Bro I’m fuckin dead at this response. Idk if it’s because I’m stoned as fuck barbecuing and glanced at the thermometer and was like “yup” out loud but holy fuck I spit out my beer. I had to give you an award. I never done that before. I used Apple Pay. Prettt cool shit bro. Thanks for the laugh of the night.

It’s pretty much the same as the “thermometer” in your average family sedan. It may look like a gauge with numbers but it’s usually just a heat indication with the following positions: no, yes, and oh shit

Does this include the Weber charcoal grills? I only ask because I’m a beginner looking to buy a Weber this summer and considering dropping the extra money for the performance model with the thermometer

It sounds weird, but basically you put whatever food in a sealed ziploc or vacuum sealed bag. The bag goes in a water bath set to the precise temp you want the food cooked to. So 130f for steak, 145-155 for chicken, 135 for pork. Leave it in there for an hour or two or three while you do other things. The timing isn’t as important as it won’t go over the set temp. Then you take it out and sear it with something usually. (It might look a little ugly coming out the bag which is why you wanna give it a nice crust on the grill or skillet.)

It takes some getting used to but if you’ve had problems over or undercooking in the past, this can help you eliminate that entirely. A lot of restaurants have been using this method for quite some time. But now home cooks have a toy to play with.

Look it up. There’s a lot you can do with it. Maybe not for everyone but it’s nice to be able to cook a piece of meat perfectly every time.

I bought a sous vide as a birthday present to myself 2 years ago, best present ever! I use it all the time, especially for any meat. Steaks are my favorite though! Get some good steaks, I use dry aged ribeye, and put it into a vacuum sealable bag along with some butter, salt, black pepper, garlic, basil, thyme, rosemary, and parsley. Seal up the bag of amazing flavors using a vacuum sealer. Set the sous vide water bath to 135°F and drop the bags in for like 4 hours. Right before you take them out open up all of the windows in the house and set up some fans to clear out the smoke that's going to happen soon. Get a cast iron skillet ripping hot, take the bags out if the water and cut them open and take the meat out and pat the meat dry. At this point the steak is perfectly medium rare the entire way through, even on the outside so it looks kinda gray and unappetizing.

So we are going one at a time and dropping the steaks into the really fucking hot skillet and it's going to sizzle and smoke like crazy. Use tongs to make sure the entire surface gets direct contact with the hot surface. It's actually okay to push down in the steak here, we're not going to lose all the juices like you normally would when cooking a steak. Make sure you get all the sides, and go extra long on any fat cap on the steak. Sous vide doesn't get hot enough to render the fat so we have to basically fry the fat off at this step.

As soon as this step is done you are ready to serve, no need to rest the meat afterwards, most of the meat in the steak never got over 140°F so it's not going to tighten up and lose its juices. I promise that it will be one of the most tender and delicious perfectly medium rare steaks you will ever eat. It sounds like a lot but it's like 10-15 minutes of prep in the afternoon, and like 20 minutes at the stove right before dinner. Super easy, super consistent, super delicious!

Brine it for an hour. You add about 20% water weight, then when you could it you usually lose about 20% water weight do you end up where you started juiciness wise. There best way to prep chicken IMHO. You can throw seasoning in your brine too.

Buy Thermoworks from their site. There are some scams from the ones off of Amazon, and I don't think they are any cheaper.

That being said, I own a Thermoworks, and they are awesome, but they are also expensive. Not everyone needs these, and a regular "Instant Read" from Amazon will be good enough. You don't need something certified to be accurate to within +-0.7F for the average cooker.

I have this one and I like it a lot. The two probes are handy and it's got a bunch of pre-set meat and doneness temps so it's easy to use for anyone who doesn't already know what temp they want their meats to be cooked to.

Thermoworks has great products, but they are expensive. /u/twatsthat linked a decent one with the TP20. Head over to /r/smoking and you'll probably find quite a few recommendations there. Depends on how much you want to spend, and what features you are looking for. There are some that will graph it for you, which for smoked foods, is great to see the temp across the 12-14 hour pork butt, and see if the grill was holding the proper temp all night. They also allow you to set Min/Max temp on the air probe, so if the charcoal is running low, it will beep at you to let you know that something is up.

I have the first one he linked, it works perfectly fine if you're not a moron. I take reviews on Amazon with a grain of salt for the most part, since most people will not even try to read instructions then blame the device when it doesn't work properly.

That and a lot of the time if a product has nothing but good reviews, they're all fake. Gotta watch out for those 5 star products, sellers will pay friends and family or give them free stuff to write fake reviews for them.

For those asking for specific products, I use a Thermapen for my day-to-day cooking and a Maverick Et-732 remote-reading thermometer. It has two probes: one for the meat and one to measure the ambient temperature of the grill. And there's a remote readout that you carry like a pager.

Temperatures:

Fish - 125°F

Fowl - 165°

Meat, rare - 125°

Meat, medium rare - 135°

I had a cooking instructor once who rated meat as "rare", "medium rare", and "ruined".

This is hugely important! So many people cook above the FDA recommended temp, and then it keeps cooking even after they take it off. Especially for pork/lamb chops or beef steaks, you gotta take it off just before that temp.

Most people won't lay out that kind of cheddar without knowing it will work. A better entry price point is the thermopop, which is like $30, made by a great company, and reads within a few seconds for lower temps.

Why a thermocouple probe? From what I know, thermocouples can measure a wide temperature range, but they're not the most accurate. According to this site, a type K thermocouple (which, from what I've gathered, is the most common one) has an accuracy of 2.2 C which is not that great.

I grew up watching cooking shows with my grandma helping her cook, along with helping my dad cook as well. Both of them can whip up better eats than I'll ever be able to, but here's the essentials I know when it comes to chicken and steak.

​

Steak:

- Trim bad pieces of fat. There are some pieces that are nice to leave on and taste great, but there's obvious ones that can go.

- Always let the meat sit out and get to (or at least close to) room temperature. Chilled steak won't cook fast enough on the inside to keep up with the grill/pan you're using.

- Salt and pepper on the cutting board, place steak on top, then salt and pepper on the top of the steak.

- Indoor cooking: Olive oil and a little bit of butter in the pan. Sear both sides (for most cuts besides filet, adding some more butter to the pan with rosemary and basting the steak after the first flip will add a ton of flavor). Then toss in the oven for a few minutes.

- Outdoor cooking: let that grill get hot as fuck. Try to just flip it ONCE.

- Use a meat thermometer, and take your steaks off of heat a few minutes before they're at the temperature you want it at. They continue to cook even after being removed for a few minutes.

- Make a compound butter (garlic and parsley is great) and drop a piece on top of the steak after removing from heat. Let it melt over it and cover the steak in a pan with foil while it continues to rest after cooking. This depends on the cut of steak you're cooking. I rarely do anything to my filets, but I do enjoy doing this with t-bones or ny strips.

​

Chicken:

- Take a fork and poke some holes in the chicken before letting marinades soak. And let marinades soak for a while. Don't rush it.

- If you're breading chicken for chicken parm or cutlets, do a 50/50ish mix of italian seasoned breadcrumbs and grated parm. Grating your own parm will make a noticeable difference.

- Outdoor cooking: let that grill get hot as fuck. Try to just flip it twice.

Note: Although even renowned cooks will disagree, both the let-it-sit until room temperature and only-flip twice theories have been pretty much debunked, thanks also to the people at Serious Eats/The Food Lab.

Yep. I've tried it both ways. I cook my steak chilled to keep it rare, and flip every 30 seconds. My steaks have never been better. I think the only flip once myth is based putely on machismo. "I'm such a good cook, i only have to flip once."

Think about the grill.. nearly all of the heat is coming from the flame below the meat. Sure, keeping it closed will help with the cooking time a little, but when you flip it every minute or so, you're allowing the heat from the flame to work through the steak in smaller increments, rather than one big swoop when you only flip once.

I'm listening but i dunnoooooo... every time you open the grill a large amount of heat escapes the grill and the thermometers drops significantly, indicating that plenty of heat is trapped and reflected back down on top of the steak. We need asbestos gloves attached through the side of the grill. Then you could flip the steaks regularly without losing heat. But the grill marks might not lool so great...

This is purely FYI, but I used to be a steak cook at a pretty high-end steak place and guess what we never had... lids. There are no lids on restaurant grills. All the high quality restaurant steaks you ever ate only had the real heat applied to them from 1 direction, the bottom. I say that just to let you know that "letting the heat" out doesn't have to make that much of a difference. Now unfortunately, because those crosshatch lines are so coveted in restaurants, we were limited to turning the steak / chicken 3 times exactly. Well, sort of, if you had a cool spot on the grill you could cheat and let it hang out there for a minute but if it was busy, there were no cool (or even open) spots. This means that by habit, I will always only turn my meat 3 times. I have to. So I have no dog in this fight lol.

At a restaurant, you’re making a lot of choices based on pleasing a lot of customers, so it’s no surprise that you are cooking for consistent results instead of making the very best steak you can for a handful of people.

That might be the case but that's not the way I thought about it. It was always my goal to make the best possible steak I could for every single customer. I wasn't a robot. I looked at each steak, how it was cut, marbling, etc and tried to cook that particular steak the way IT needed to be cooked. You're right that sometimes the sheer volume meant I couldn't pay attention to each one the way I wanted to, but thankfully it was also a small restaurant. We only had 30 seats. So unless it was a holiday (Father's Day was huge) I usually had the ability to put really good effort into my cooking.

but.. if you open the door and quickly flip it and close it again, you're applying the same heat to the food.

The thing is that when grilling, the heat from the flame below is cooking the meat faster than the heat that is trapped when the lid is closed.

Give it a try.. you may not notice a difference at all. My dad was a huge proponent of OMG FLIP ONCE!! he made great steaks, so there is nothing wrong.

Kenji Lopez-alt did a mythbusters on it, proving that by flipping it more than once, it doesn't ruin anything, but can actually help. He also showed that flipping the steak by stabbing it with a fork isn't a mortal sin either. :P

The same thing goes for letting it sit with tinfoil over it after cooking - if you do that then you're now steaming your steak which could make it mushy and continue to cook it. Simply putting butter on it after cooking is more than enough to melt it.

I don't ever close the grill. It stays open. Now if i was coming something 2" thick, that might change my approach, and I'd go with a reverse sear. But anything thinner, and I'm cooking with coals 3" from the meat (a Webber Smokey Joe that i keep around specifically to cook steaks).

I've done several reverse Sears. I've found the best way for me is with a baby Webber (Smokey Joe works better than a Webber kettle imo, due to the height away from the coals) with s full load of lump coals in a chimney starter. Get it scorching hot, then flip regularly. Perfect rare to medium rare every time. Though if you're cooking in a skillet, the reverse sear works best.

Well the point isn’t just to have the steak warm up but you put salt on it. The salt draws out moisture as it warms, kinda brines a little bit and seeps back into the meat. You can say it’s debunked but I’ve noticed a big difference in my steaks texture and flavor by doing this.

I guess you could say that I dry brine my steaks with kosher salt. But you'll still get the same crust regardless of the number of flips. But the difference is, by flipping it regularly, if gives the meat time to cool. That reduces the amount of brown meat between the crust and the red/pink. When it comes to steaks, the less brown the better.

the comment I replied to pointed out accurately that two of the major points made are myths.

"cut off the bad fat" What

Olive oil and butter are not ideal due to low smoke points.

Pepper can easily burn during high temp cooking

Additionally a lot of the other points are just turning the meat into a butter delivery system. Now this is certainly what a lot of restaurants do but I think it is crap advice for a home cook. If you nail the fundamentals you don't need to drench your food in butter.

Agreed with all except this. Olive oil is terrible for cooking. It still has a lot of olive residue in it which burns to cancerogenic tar and damages the taste. Use rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, or pig lard.

If you pour it directly in the pan it's roasting the entire time the pan is heating up. If it's on the steak there's less time for the olive oil to burn. Because it's only in contact with the pan while that side of beef is touching.

Does that make a big difference? It probably makes the olive oil burn less.
Should you use olive oil for high heat cooking? No, but if you still want to this is a better way.

The one who created the one you consume this days was Monsanto, that should be everything you need to know, but anyways, just got you a random link from MDA since It's not like something I read today !

Thirty-one studies examined the effects of canola oil-based diets on circulating lipid subclass levels in clinical intervention trials. The available studies, summarized in Table 1, demonstrate heterogeneity in terms of the study population chosen, including gender, age range, blood lipid levels, and health status. Two studies evaluated the longer-term effects of canola oil on circulating lipid levels.21,22 Gulesserian et al.21 compared baseline and endpoint serum cholesterol levels after 5 months in which children and adolescents with familial hypercholesterolemia received dietary counselling and were instructed to replace as many visible fats as possible by canola oil. Data revealed significant reductions of TC, LDL-C, and triacylglycerol (TAG) levels in the participants. It should be noted, however, that participants were also instructed to eat high quantities of fruits and vegetables and include a weekly meal of fish in their diet. Thus, it cannot be concluded that canola oil alone was responsible for the favorable changes observed. Sarkkinen et al.22 conducted a 6-month dietary intervention study in hypercholesterolemic adults and found that LDL-C levels were lowered (3.7%) from baseline in the rapeseed group; however, no significant differences were found in serum TC, LDL-C, HDL-C, and TAG levels between canola oil-based diets and diets with oils higher in SFAs. A study such as this that extends over several months may be associated with compliance problems and seasonality effects, which could explain why no differences were observed in endpoint cholesterol levels between the treatment and control groups. 23

Just saying hating on canole is almost like being antivax, you are making links where there is none monsato is bad so canola must be bad...

I read your link, but I think they never said the study involves people using canola oil for cooking ? I mean, they never talk about the properties of polyunsaturated fats when being heat. Actually they don't even talk about temperatures so as far as I understood it, they may as well be using canola oil as a salad dressing and that is all good.

The post was about using canola oil to cook a steak, and as stated before, that study doesn't mention the properties of canola oil once it reaches it's smoke point while being heated up.

With this said, search some information about using canola oil as a cooking oil and see it for yourself, don't believe in me.

Sorry for my link, I made a quick search to give you a starting point on the topic. About Monstanto, they have been a shitty Co making money with peoples health for a ton of years, it's an interesting topic of you want to read about it.

Read the answer before this one if you want a more detailed explanation.

​

The link was just one I stumbled upon and read and was on the correct path, not something I use as a basis for this.

​

Read your link, but then again, we say extra virgin olive oil is bad for cooking since it's smoking point is low so it can be bad, hence, you cook with light olive oil, right ?

If you think that is correct or have hear that from any serious chef, then you should know that canola's oil smoking point is lower than extra virgin olive oil. Once the Canola Oil is heated to that point, which as said before, is lower than Extra Virgin Olive Oil, the PUFAs will turn into toxic compunds.

I've tried to find one to no avail, the best I saw is the omega 3/6 ratio isn't 1:1 so it's not the best brain food. Everything else says it's a-ok and healthier then most options. OP trying to say just in the scenario of pan searing steaks but even then you should never cook with a temp above what your oil can handle before it burns (true of any oil) so I'm calling BS on canola being bad. Monsato being bad is another story but canola itself is a very healthy option.

I grew up watching cooking shows with my grandma helping her cook, along with helping my dad cook as well. Both of them can whip up better eats than I'll ever be able to, but here's the essentials I know when it comes to chicken and steak.

Steak:

- Trim bad pieces of fat. There are some pieces that are nice to leave on and taste great, but there's obvious ones that can go.

- Always let the meat sit out and get to (or at least close to) room temperature. Chilled steak won't cook fast enough on the inside to keep up with the grill/pan you're using.

- Salt and pepper on the cutting board, place steak on top, then salt and pepper on the top of the steak.

- Indoor cooking: Olive oil and a little bit of butter in the pan. Sear both sides (for most cuts besides filet, adding some more butter to the pan with rosemary and basting the steak after the first flip will add a ton of flavor). Then toss in the oven for a few minutes.

- Outdoor cooking: let that grill get hot as fuck. Try to just flip it twice.

- Use a meat thermometer, and take your steaks off of heat a few minutes before they're at the temperature you want it at. They continue to cook even after being removed for a few minutes.

- Make a compound butter (garlic and parsley is great) and drop a piece on top of the steak after removing from heat. Let it melt over it and cover the steak in a pan with foil while it continues to rest after cooking. This depends on the cut of steak you're cooking. I rarely do anything to my filets, but I do enjoy doing this with t-bones or ny strips.

Chicken:

- Take a fork and poke some holes in the chicken before letting marinades soak. And let marinades soak for a while. Don't rush it.

- If you're breading chicken for chicken parm or cutlets, do a 50/50ish mix of italian seasoned breadcrumbs and grated parm. Grating your own parm will make a noticeable difference.

Best how? Here's a list of your standard commercially-available cooking oils with their smoke points. Note that while it's not on this list, pig lard usually has a smoke point around 400f.

Coconut: 350f

Peanut: 450f

Avocado: 520f

Coconut oil has one of the lowest smoke points of all the typical cooking oils. It's fine if you're cooking with low heat, but otherwise it will burn very quickly. Pig lard isn't much better, as I noted. So I'm curious as to how lard and coconut are "best".

The smoke point of a refined olive oil is in the region of 200°C, more than enough for caramelization and maillard reaction. There's little reason to go that high unless you want to deep-fry. "Normal" butter (non-ghee/clarified) smokes at ~150..160°C

It's problematic, of course, because it does need some decent temperature control - I wouldn't try it with unknown gear and a huge slab of quality meat.

Adding to the problem is all the fuckery going on behind the "olive oil" label, though all tampering will go towards raising the applicable temp.

So, yes, using a highly refined / treated sunflower oil takes you o the safe side. But olive oil works at the very least in principle, and I'd say: when you know what you are doing and using.

I was trying to remember where I got the olive oil / butter idea from and another commenter mentioned it was (a spin-off) a Gordon Ramsay tip. The drunk-cooking-steak-loving degenerate I am definitely tried my own Food Network twist. I don't cook steak inside often so hopefully the 2-3 times I've used my olive oil and butter method hasn't cut too many years off my life.

Don't pepper meat you are going to cook at high temps. Pepper burns. It becomes bitter.

Never sear with olive oil. It's a waste of oil and it is really gross when it's that hot. Olive oil smokes. Use something hearty like lard.

You don't want the grill "hot as fuck", you want a section of the grill hot as fuck. That's where you sear. "Hot as fuck" as you put it leads to charred food. You sear it on both sides, then move the meat off the coals onto the other side of the grid and cover it, letting the juices mix with the smoke to cook it more slowly. Of course cooked to desired doneness.

For the chicken, I think it's a matter of preference, but I disagree with you. There are some examples where "shit" ingredients are better.

First of all, freshly grated parm is too expensive to waste in a breading. It's a sensation and experience. It's something you want on the top of things, just barely melting like bonito. It's wonderful.

Secondly, when you use a dried parm, it doesn't get all fucky. You want a nice and crispy coating. Regular, dried parm (like 4C sells in a glass jar) is perfect. In fact, the 4C Italian breadcrumbs are perfect. Add more if you like.

Fresh parm still gives off grease and oil and gets chewy. And I'm down with a softer chicken parm, but I prefer one that is nice and crispy.

Finally, just to get your chicken parm right, let me flesh out what you've missed here.

First, you need to buy cutlets or make your own. They need to be uniform in thickness. And as you said, you need to poke holes...well, you should pound it with a meat tenderizing hammer. Dude, it's so much better that way. Especially your coating. Surprisingly, smooth chicken doesn't hold it's coating as well. Who knew?

Then, you need to flour it on both sides very quickly and immediately dip it into scrambled eggs. For parm, I think it needs to be watered down with water or milk. You don't want a thick coating. And you need to let the eggs rest so they aren't too airy. I actually prefer using liquid eggs (whole or not) because of uniformity.

Finally, this is the key - and I learned this from a Japanese chef who didn't have access to the ingredients he wanted back in the 1970's. His secret to cutlets is cornmeal. Polenta may be too coarse. When you are making your breading, it's mostly Italian breadcrumbs, some dried parmesan cheese and a small amount of polenta/cornmeal. You get a very nice crunch with it. But you cannot use too much and it can't be too coarse.

Then...you cook it over medium-low heat in extra virgin olive oil. And don't be afraid to remove the pan from the heat. You don't want the coating to overcook. But since your cutlet is thin, it should be fine.

Finally, top it with marinara, put a thin slice of mozza on top and broil on low in the 2nd to top rack with the door ajar so that it won't burn on the chicken, but will bubble the cheese. If you think the cutlet will burn, rub some olive oil on the exposed part with your fingers.

How DARE u throw shade at my Nan! Just kidding but this is all wonderful information. Definitely will keep in mind next time I cook up some steak (probably tomorrow). As for the chicky parm I should’ve clarified I never poke holes when making that, just pound it down and thin. Hole poking is more for when I’m grilling kebabs or bbq. Regardless appreciate the info you sound like a weapon in the kitchen.

You don't want the grill "hot as fuck", you want a section of the grill hot as fuck. That's where you sear. "Hot as fuck" as you put it leads to charred food. You sear it on both sides, then move the meat off the coals onto the other side of the grid and cover it, letting the juices mix with the smoke to cook it more slowly.

Better to reverse the process. Cook with the lid on and finish over the hot coals. This makes the steak crispier because it was more recently over the highest heat.

Never sear with olive oil. It's a waste of oil and it is really gross when it's that hot. Olive oil smokes. Use something hearty like lard.

He did need to specify that he isn't talking about extra-virgin olive oil. Get the light olive oil. That's for searing.

Make a compound butter (garlic and parsley is great) and drop a piece on top of the steak after removing from heat....I rarely do anything to my filets, but I do enjoy doing this with t-bones or ny strips.

I feel this is a bit of a misconception as well, Filets will usually have less flavor than a t-bone or strip due to not having much fat on them. They have great texture, but usually you want to take steps to enhance flavor ( a herb butter is great, pepper crust with a blue cheese/ butter topping is good, can't go wrong with wrapping in bacon to introduce some more fat )

You can really do what you prefer and it's mostly up to amount of time needed to finish the steak. Also, make sure your pan is oven safe, like a cast iron. If I do this method I always use a probe thermometer and take it out several degrees before the goal.

It can also really depend on the power of your grill or stove. I found that I couldn't cook most of my steaks on my current setup without cooking all the way through because it would take a lot longer. The only method that worked for me which made my steaks taste great was doing a cast iron on the stove after leaving the steak out a long time to get to room temp. Before that my cuts of meat were very dry and cooked all the way through.

I think the bigger issue that causes dry chicken is over-cooking. Not much of a difference poking small holes and letting them fill with marinade as opposed to poking a slightly larger hole (or two) while measuring the temp while cooking.

The "continues to cook" thing was my breakthrough. (That's a little imprecise, though I'm sure this is indeed what you meant by "cook": the heat disperses from the edges to the interior over those couple of resting minutes. That's what's huge about getting the thermometer to the center of the thickest part, since you can accidentally overcook the meat as heat spreads from edge to middle.)

Weird...I had been reading recently (from America's Test Kitchen, no less) that marinating for chicken for a long time doesn't really do anything...shouldn't be more than 20-30 mins. Now I don't know what to believe.

On the subject of pre-grated cheeses: most of them are coated in a potato starch so that they won't fuse together and will stay pre-shredded. Fine for tacos and many applications, but if you're going for class, grating your own will make a noticable difference.

Learned cooking at a burger joint:
When you put meat on the grill it sticks to the hot metal. It is reasonable to want to prevent this and to assume the longer to is on the more stuck it gets but this isn't the case. If the meat is still sticking to the grill that means it's not done yet (or you burned it 😕). Give it time to come unstuck by it's self.

A good meat thermometer makes all the difference, get that shit to the exact temperature required and it’s juicy af. Also, use twice the amount of seasoning you think you need, half of it is gonna come off on the pan.

Uncomplicate yourself. Get a regular NSF-Approved pocket digital thermometer with no bells and whistles. I use a Comark PDT300, the same thing that's in a million restaurants, and costs less than $20. It doesn't beep or flash or have red and green lights or different "ranges" with pigs and cows and chickens. It has a power button and a number. Just shoot for your numbers. For me, beef is 55°C, pork is 65°C, chicken is 75°C. Pork and chicken don't change, beef is a matter of preference.

Just remember "carryover" heat... The center of the meat will keep getting hotter after the meat is removed from the heat. (The outside is hot, the inside is cooler, and they both move towards an equilibrium point)

Meat temp - 135 is a warm, pink center and the recommended temperature from most sources.

Pro tip - put a small pat of butter on your steak right when it comes off the grill, let rest until the butter has melted. Resting means put it on the plate, then dont fucking touch it. Dont poke it with a fork, or give it a little cut to check if it's done, or keep moving it around with tongs.

I make steak, a lot. Like an unreasonable amount of the time. For Filet Mignon, I pull it off the grill/pan at an internal temp around 123-124. A good prime Filet is great rare. For Ribeye (my personal favorite) I pull them off around 130 - the extra temp helps render the internal fat and marbling, but still safely keeps the steak in a juicy medium-rare range. New York strip/porterhouse I will pull at 127-128 - not as fatty as ribeye, but still needs some loving imho. For tougher cuts such as tri-tip, skirt steak, flap meat, etc, I suggest marinating and pulling around 135-137 - these will already be somewhat chewy pieces, so the extra heat gives them a more biteable texture. Hope this helps, enjoy your next steak - no matter what temp you pick it’s good if you enjoy it!

Edit: these are all temps you should pull the meat off the heat source. Cover the meat with tin foil and allow to rest for 5-10 minutes. Residual heat will continue to cook the meat a little and you’ll be greeted by the appropriate donenesses (rare through medium).

Dont cook but both parents do. People greatly underestimate the power of salt and pepper. Put it on before cooking. You don't comprehend how many people even restaurant chefs that dont do it. The best steak I have ever had was king soopers sirloin grilled by my father with the only seasoning being salt and pepper. I grew up very well off and have eaten at 5 star steak houses. Many don't compare.

Not a man, but I like to marinate it for at least half an hour, sear it in a pan (cook in oil or butter on very high heat on both sides to make a “crust” and get it golden brown on the outside) then simmer with liquid covering it for at least 45 minutes (low heat so that bubbles come up in the liquid but not boiling). One of my favorite flavor combos is yogurt+garlic+curry powder for the marinade and chicken stock+curry powder+garlic+onions+chunks of carrot and potato for the liquid. The chicken will be falling off the bone tender but with some texture if you get a good sear first.

I don't cook chicken the same as you, I use a sous vide cooker, but yes...always and absolutely yes you want the outside as dry as possible if you are looking to create a crust.

The science is the maillard reaction, basically sugars/amino acids/what-have-yous changing when exposed to high heat. Temperatures need to be high to bring about the Maillard reaction, but as long as the food is very wet, its temperature won’t climb above the boiling point of water. If you throw wet chicken into a pan it needs to boil off all that surface liquid before it starts to do it's thing and by doing so it raise the temperature (cook) the rest of the meat more than what you intended before you get that nice crust..

If I'm doing something like steaks I'll throw it in my sous vide to fully cook it. Pat it bone dry and maybe throw it in the fridge for a couple minutes to drop the temperature a hair as the meat is done and then throw it into a cast iron pan as demonically hot as possible to sear it for a nice finish.

For chicken breasts in the pan it's literally the easiest thing possible:

Put your stove high heat (not the highest but 80% heat)

Put some oil in a pan and let the pan preheat on the stove

Take your chicken breasts and using either a second cutting board or some other tool, flatten (aka beat the meat) the thick side of the breast until it reaches approximately one and a half fingers thickness.

Put the chicken breast(s) into the preheated pan on high heat, let it cook until light brown on both sides of the breast. Then, lower the heat to a medium and let it cook for another couple of minutes.

Biggest thing right there - pound it flat. If your chicken is 1/2" thick on one end and 2" thick on the other, your choices are either half well-cooked/half raw, or half well-cooked/half over-cooked. Uniform thickness is key. It'll contract as it cooks too, getting back toward normal size

I season chicken breasts before cooking. Usually coarse sea salt, pepper, thyme, and sage.

Then I sear them on both sides on fairly high heat. They should still be raw in the middle when you're done searing. Find videos on YouTube for how to properly sear them.
3.After that, they go in the oven at 375F for 15 minutes. Obviously preheat the oven first.

When that's done, let them rest. Resting meat means cover it with foil and let it sit out cooling for 5 minutes.

My "secret"? I marinate the chicken in Italian dressing for a couple of hours. If it's thick chicken breasts, I slice them to make them thinner. Any other chicken gets marinated. Then, it's all about cooking it to the right range (about 150 degrees internally) and LET IT REST!!!! People often overcook their chicken, as well as pork!! Resting is a huge key! It should rest before AND after cooking!! The rest before cooking is out of the fridge. Let whatever meat it is set outside of the fridge for at least 30 mins. Resting after should be at least 5 mins.

I used to cook my chicken to 165 until I came across some articles recommending 145 last year. Chicken breast in particular is SO MUCH BETTER cooked to 145. There still isn’t any pink so it won’t gross people out (and the research indicates it’s just as safe as 165) but it is far juicer and with far less risk of being overcooked/dry/rubbery. I can grill chicken breast to pefection now.

Cook it longer ar a higher temperature if it's still pink. Never have had that happen. You can grill it but if you cant, baking it will do. If pinkness is the problem cut it up and cook it on a skillet or stir fry it.

You sear the skin in a cast iron with 50/50 butter and canola oil. Skin down. Then you put it in the oven skinside up til its done. When youve cooked enough you know it's done by just poking it, in the meantime search for the thumbtrick online.

I got your answer buddy. First, take the chicken out and let it come up to room temp. About an hour should do. If you're cooking breasts I either cut them in half or spattlecock them. Heat up a skillet to high heat, drizzle some oil and sear both sides then reduce heat to medium and cook about four minutes a side.

Now heres the most important part, let it sit. You have to let it rest for the juices to settle back into the meat. If you cut into it too soon, all the juices drip out. A few minutes should be enough. You can use any marinade or spice rub.

I remember the first time I cooked my mom a chicken breast after I started cooking professionally.

Salt and pepper, medium heat, skin side down till it's nice and golden brown, flip it over, add thyme and a few garlic gloves with a tablespoon or 2 of butter and into the oven. She said it was the juiciest chicken breast she's ever had.

Baking sheet on a pan, light coating of olive oil, season your chicken, oven at 380 degrees. Cover the chicken with another sheet of baking paper or whatever the fuck it is. Cook for I don't remember how long. But every time I cook it this way it comes out super juicy and tender. I think the baking sheet covering them and lower temp+longer cooking is the important parts

Get the idea of the "best" method of cooking out of your head. There is the method that gets you the flavor you want, but there is no best.

I cook chicken on propane and charcoal grills as well as in the oven. IMO the easiest thing is to cook it spatchcock style - cut the spine out of the bird using poultry shears, flay it and then press down hard on the breasts to flatten it out. Not only does this make the chicken much flatter (which reduces overall cooking time) but has the added benefit of placing mostly bones you don't care about burning underneath the bird. Cook at an appropriate roasting temperature (350°F or higher) until an instant read meat thermometer reads 160 in the thickest part of the breast. That will probably take about 30 minutes to an hour depending on your heat source.

As far as seasoning, for chicken I either go with a generic BBQ seasoning or salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder and some Italian seasoning.

You're looking for:

a hardish crust. It sounds less delicious until I tell you that I traps all your juices inside.

browning. Look up the Maillard reaction and learn to recognize the difference between charring and burning.

juices running clear. This is the easiest trick to visually verify that your chicken is fully cooked.

Chicken on the grill is tough, especially thick cuts, like breast meat. Use a marinade with plenty of fat, and indirect heat once it has the color you want. If I'm grilling chicken, I prefer dark meat with bones in them, like leg quarters, wings, and thighs.

If you want to cook the best whole chicken, Thomas Keller's recipe has been my favorite, and it comes out perfect each time if you follow the steps:

21-25 minutes at 450 F. Time it based on the thickness of the chicken breast. Let it sit for at least 5 minutes before cutting it after removing it from the oven. If you cut it immediately the water will evaporate quickly and lead to a drier chicken.

Brush olive oil on chicken breasts and season to your liking. Bake 400 degrees until internal temp of at least 165, depending on size of breasts, could be 20-40 minutes. Make sure you have a good quick read meat thermometer.

If you’re making a whole chicken, I like to stuff it with lemon slices and rosemary. You can skip the rosemary if you like. Brush the outside with olive oil for nice crispy skin. Season as you like, salt and pepper work fine. For baking times I’ve had to tinker with how my oven works, but typically I’ve done 350 for 40 minutes, 400 for 20 minutes.

Usually whenever you’ve had a good meal at a restaurant and you try to emulate it at home without getting it, the secret is more salt and pepper and more butter. Seasoning your food well when cooking makes all the difference in the world.

Peopel who claim that usually do not understand the purpose, and the correct amounts, of salt and pepper in food. A well-seasoned steak does not taste salty, there is a difference between well-seasoned (which brings out the other flavors of the food) and over-seasoned. And putting on salt and pepper after the food is cooked is not the same thing.

Obviously you should have salt and pepper on the table so if someone wants more, they are free to do so. But cooking without seasoning at all just because maybe someone thinks they want bland food (spoilers; 99% of the time they don’t want bland food, they just want it to not be too salty) is bad advice.

Chicken breasts are hard to grill, you're pretty likely to either dry them out or undercook them in the middle.

If you need to grill chicken breasts (because, say, your wife doesn't like thigh meat), split them long ways, then hit them with a little oil and seasoning and cook on a grill that's hot AF. 2-3 minutes per side and you're golden

You know what tastes good? Well cooked meat. You know what tastes way better than almost any food? Butter and salt.

Season the hell out of your meat. For steak I like to be a bit pure and just go with salt and pepper, but a lot more than you think. For chicken I’ll do some dry herbs as well depending on the flavors I’m aiming for. Going to your grocery store and getting pre mixed seasoning kits is a great way to get started - just check if they already have salt in them, then apply salt as needed. Fish has the same rule as chicken, and pork the same as steak. NB: if you want to get fancy, feel free to stray from this path.

For the actual cooking bit, it depends how you’re cooking it. I like to sous vide the steaks and finish in the pan, or to just cook them in the pan on very high heat to get a good crust. After you’ve gotten a good sear, put some butter and fresh herbs if you can get them into the pan and spoon the melted butter over the steaks to finish cooking. Chicken more or less the same, but you don’t need to get the pan so hot, and I like to finish it in the oven. Grilling is a different ballgame. Use a meat thermometer to help!!

The other thing to lift your dishes is sauce. When you pan cook the meat, there’s gonna be bits in the bottom of the pan. This stuff is packed with flavor. You can take some onions or shallots and sauté them in it and then take some liquid (wine, vinegar, spirits, etc.) to deglaze - absorb the stuff off the bottom - if you’re using spirits or high alcohol wine, take a flame just above the liquid and flambé it (look up how to do this before you attempt!!!!). Then after that put in some cream or stock (depends how thick of a sauce you want) and just reduce it. If you want it to be thicker add some butter in.

I learned a lot from reading some books but mostly watching YouTube videos. Find some chefs you like and when you watch them don’t watch them for the recipes, anyone can google these. Watch how they’re doing things. Read articles about cooking!

Definitely check out Binging with Babish and Gordon Ramsey for some basics.

I learned it's easier to succeed at baking chicken thighs than chicken breasts because they have a way higher margin if error when it comes to tastiness and flavor.

Edit table spoon or two of olive oil. Salt and pepper. Put in like 4 chicken thighs. Toss them up with the oil and throw on a bit of salt, pepper, and an assorted herb shaker you can get at grocery store.

Bake for 30-40 minutes at 425

Move to top rack of oven and broil for 5-10 min

Now you have juicy delicious well baked thighs with a bit of a tasty char on the outside with proper seasonings.

My slight change is that I put more seasonings on than the chef recommended. This doesn't make it objectively better, but it's better for me because I like seasonings and white people even white chefs do not season their food enough.

Instead of hoping you get the right doneness while you're cooking on the stovetop, bake your steaks to temp and sear at the end.

This lets you get a beautiful sear, skip the rest period, virtually eliminates the cooking gradient, and allows easy timing of your chosen level of doneness.

You need to use a thermometer, and it takes a while.

Oven at 250-300 degrees (Lower is better, higher is faster), Season as normal (Salt and Pepper)

Cook till you hit 105 F internal (This will reach 120 with time and sear) for rare. +10 degrees for Medium-Rare, +20 for Medium, +30 for Medium-Well. Can take up to 40 minutes if you like your steaks cooked hard.

Sear in nearly smoking high-heat oil in a heavy pan with a pat of butter, or over a grill on full blast, remembering to sear the sides and fat. The steaks should take less than 2 minutes to sear all surfaces

To use this method, you must use thick cut (1.5 inch+ recommended) steaks.

This needs more upvotes. I've been doing pretty much this, but on my pellet grill. Typically, I'll put mine (Louisiana Grills CS450) on "smoke" mode, which gets it to right about 200 degrees on the grilling surface. Smoke time depends on the cut and how rare you want it, I typically pull mine at about 110. I set them on a plate in my toaster oven on keep warm mode, while the smoker heats up to cleaning temp, about 650ish degrees. 30 seconds a side, pat of butter, let rest.

Prioritize proper cooking of your chosen cut of meat. Different cuts have different properties, but it's not all that complicated. You just can't go off board from a proven recipe because you think you know better, you're lazy, or you're impatient. If your cut is supposed to be in the oven for 45 minutes at 300 degrees, you don't get to decide to do 30 minutes at 400 degrees because you want to eat sooner and expect the same results. Follow the steps. Respect the work.

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Ultimately, it's not that hard. I just made two thick ribeye steaks on a cast iron skillet tonight: 30 seconds to render fat, 4:20 (sup) on each side. It's not to-the-second precise, but you can't just dick around on your phone and eyeball 4:20 or whoopsie and cook the shit for seven minutes. Focus up and do the job right and you're fine.

A lot of the rest is to taste. Do you season your steaks? I think you should* but some think you shouldn't, and it's up to the individual where they stand.

*You should probably season everything that hits a pan unless you're opting not to for a specific reason a rookie wouldn't know. I sometimes make heavy dishes and will compliment them with steamed, mild-flavored vegetables like broccoli for contrast.

If you can leave it long enough with salt on it is ok. There's basically a window where you shouldn't. Think it's about 15-60 mins precook. Salt brings the liquid out of the steak which makes it dry in that window. Anything before 15 mins is fine, anything over 60 mins and the steak reabsorbs the liquid so seasons the inside of the steak as well like a brine. It makes it really tender.

There’s a 500 degree difference between your grill and your room temperature. An extra 30 degrees is not going to be consequential. In fact it’s generally not recommended for food safety reasons. You’re better off leaving it in the fridge or even the freezer (if not too thick) and then cooking it more rare.

There are plenty of valid reasons to let your meat reach room temp before cooking... And many not to. Cooking your meat from various states (freezer, fridge, counter) all change how you cook your meat. As long as you're cooking it to a safe temp and the way you like it then it doesn't really matter. Though from the fridge or room temp is best.

This is the highest upvoted bad advice. Your temperature must be completely consistent and every steak needs to be exactly the same. It isn't. Time is the one thing that should be flexible and everything else consistent. Use a thermometer to measure when it's done and don't go by time.

Not just steak, poultry and pork as well. If I recall, the heat of cooking causes protein chains in the meat to contract. Letting the meat rest after cooking allows those chains to relax, making meat much more tender and chewable. In addition, even though out of the oven, the meat will continue to cook. So if you like your meat to be 145ºF, you pull it out of the oven at 140ºF. Most recommendations I have seen suggest about five minutes resting with some foil laid lightly across the top, just enough time to dress your salad and get your plates ready.

Probably not the best advice for a "novice" but practice helps a lot. (This is an sddendum to a lot of the already existing posts) butI think there's a perceived barrier to entry to cooking that's chalked up mostly to fear. Really just pay attention to what you're doing and your mistakes will eventually correct themselves. Idk if I'm articulating it right but my gist is that practice is great and you can't be afraid of failure otherwise despite all the technical tips and meat thermometers you get you might still suck. Best of luck with everything! Conquer that fear!Cooking is one of my favorite things and I wish to god I had gone to culinary school

One of my roommates in college already had a degree in culinary science. Whenever I asked him how to get better at grilling, cooking, etc...his response was to ask what I wanted to get better at. When I told him we went to this little Mexican meat market and got some meat that was all very low price but higher quality than what we could get at Walmart for example. Fired up the grill or oven and cooked. He said that cooking is about failure just as much as success. When you have failed 100 times you have learned 100 lessons and in turn your success will be 100 times better than if you had some type of cheat sheet or been bestowed some type of wisdom. I grill every weekend now not only to feed my family but get better. It's amazing practice that is very cheap as compared to dining out. Practice practice practice!

This is what did it for me. Rather than chasing after another recipe or another cut of meat after the last unsuccessful attempt, stick with the damn process. Do it again. Pay attention to what you did last time. This is what makes perfection and when you become one of those people who can look at a piece of meat and instantly know how cook it to get a certain taste. All these gif recipes are so disposable and you move onto the next having learned nothing. Better yet, keep notes on temps and times and thicknesses and sources of your materials. Take none of this for granted.

If I gave up on my first steak then all I would have become is an expert on how to turn organic material into mud flaps.

Especially chicken, people tend to almost incinerate it as they are worried about salmonella. Now I'm not saying eat raw chicken lol but cook it till the juices turn clear or use a meat thermometer if your really concerned!

Also go to a decent butcher, it will cost more but I find there is so much more flavour than normal super market bought steak. I live in the UK and our super markets do have pretty meat but it not in the same league as the good butchers near me .

Chicken HAS to be cooked completely. To cook it all the way w/o burning, you want the heat lower, and leave the meat on longer.
With beef, the rarer you want your steak the higher the heat and less time you'll leave the steak on

This is what I was going to say. It’s not the “traditional” way of cooking meat, it for me, using the sous vide precision cooker has removed a lot of the anxiety I usually had around making sure to thoroughly cook but not over cook meat - it’s especially nice with meats that dry out easily, like chicken breast.

I am a qualified Chef who has worked in Restaurants and Gastro Pubs capable of achieving 2-3 Rosettes. I no longer work in the catering trade but my skills are still there.

For steak 🥩

• You pay for what you get when it comes to good quality cuts. You should be looking for a dry-aged [at least] 28-day mature steak of a good quality cut (Rib-eye, Sirloin, Fillet etc.), preferably with marbled fat throughout. If the roar steak is red, leave it alone. The more dark it becomes the tender it will be, but don’t let it spoil. The more red a steak is, the more moisture it will contain and you will effectively boil the meat instead of griddle it, which will make it tough, difficult to chew and will wash out the flavour.

• Make sure you get yourself a good quality griddle pan. One with a thick base which won’t drop in temperature when you place the steak in it.

• Ensure you can get that pan really nice and hot. I have a halogen job at home and to cut a long story short it does not get hot enough. Keep the pan dry, so no oils or butter.

• If possible, take your steak out of the fridge early and pop it in a container (we used to use a cleaned out ice-cream tub) and pop in some Rosemary, Thyme, Garlic and vegetable oil, enough to coat the steak. If you put more than one steak in it will bruise where each steak makes contact with one another but that is cosmetic only, it makes no difference to the taste. Make sure you don’t begin cooking your steak until it’s at room temperature, trust me, it makes all the difference. The oil should penetrate the tissues slightly and lock in that flavour.

• Grab a plate or tray and sprinkle some good quality crystallised salt (I use Maldon which is from Essex, UK) and some cracked black peppercorns an sprinkle on the plate. Scrape some of the oil off your steak as you lift it out of the container on both sides and lay it on the plate, repeat seasoning on the top.

• Lay your steak in the griddle pan and cook for approximately 3 minutes on each side (depending on how you like it cooked. You can test how cooked it is by comparing the resilience to your Thenar Eminence (Google it!) simply by touching your thumb on each fingertip, as follows:

Blue = Open hand.

Rare = Thumb to index finger.

Medium Rare = Thumb to middle finger.

Medium = Thumb to ring finger.

Medium Well = Thumb to little finger.

• If there is a thickness of fat on your steak, finish off by holding it against the pan to render it down slightly and crisp it up (if you intend to eat it).

• Finally, leave it to rest on a hot plate (not hot enough to continue cooking) or simply remove the pan off the heat a minute before you intend to stop cooking. If you cut into the steak before it’s rested you will see a distinct line where the blood has not yet spread back into the outside parts of the steak.

Let me know if you want tips for Chicken too, but there’s a lot of good quality tips already here.

For steak 🥩
• You pay for what you get when it comes to good quality cuts. You should be looking for a dry-aged [at least] 28-day mature steak of a good quality cut (Rib-eye, Sirloin, Fillet etc.), preferably with marbled fat throughout. If the roar steak is red, leave it alone. The more dark it becomes the tender it will be, but don’t let it spoil. The more red a steak is, the more moisture it will contain and you will effectively boil the meat instead of griddle it, which will make it tough, difficult to chew and will wash out the flavour.

• If possible, take your steak out of the fridge early and pop it in a container (we used to use a cleaned out ice-cream tub) and pop in some Rosemary, Thyme, Garlic and vegetable , enough to coat the steak. If you put more than one steak in it will bruise where each steak makes contact with one another but that is cosmetic only, it makes no difference to the taste. Make sure you don’t begin cooking your steak until it’s at room temperature, trust me, it makes all the difference. The oil should penetrate the tissues slightly and lock in that flavour.

This is perfect. Learn the feel for doneness. With chicken breasts, they have a bounce when done. Pick them up with tongs and drop them. If done they have a slight bounce and look firm. Also they will just split if you grab them with the tongs and twist when they are just right.

Don’t cook things frozen and use the max heat your grill will make. The hardest part as a cook at home is the heat output of everything in a house is far lower than with commercial equipment.

Let's break this down one issue at a time. First, the internal temperature. While it's true that slowly bringing a steak up to its final serving temperature will promote more even cooking, the reality is that letting it rest at room temperature accomplishes almost nothing.

After the first 20 minutes—the time that many chefs and books will recommend you let a steak rest at room temperature—the center of the steak had risen to a whopping 39.8°F. Not even a full two degrees. So I let it go longer. 30 minutes. 50 minutes. 1 hour and 20 minutes. After 1 hour and 50 minutes, the steak was up to 49.6°F in the center. Still colder than the cold water comes out of my tap in the summer, and only about 13% closer to its target temperature of a medium-rare 130°F than the steak in the fridge.

My girlfriend is a beast in the kitchen. I didn't start to learn until I bought her a badass set of chef's knives (which included a battle ax of a cleaver) as a gift. I wanted to use them too, but I didn't know how to cook so I just cut stuff up for her while she cooked. Eventually I started doing more and more on my own.

This article goes into more detail, but the basic conclusion is that the moisture retained by letting it “rest” is very minimal and not enough to cause any significant change in the enjoyment of the steak. Best method is probably to dig in immediately and mop up whatever spills on the plate with the meat itself.

None of the methods made a difference (except for sous vide) until I got an instant read thermometer. This is key. Chicken to 165, steak med rare at 130, pork is safe to eat at 145. BBQ pork, such as ribs or butts, temp goes up to 195-203. Thermapen is a good but expensive one. I bought mine from amazon for half the price. Lavatools is the brand.

“Toughness” comes quick above these temps. Some people like the chew of pork or steak, some like it soft and spongy.. My mom cooked steak and pork chops until she was sure they were done, and my jaws new they were done. I didn’t like steak or pork chops until I learned to cook.

Best chicken and steak I’ve had is from sous vide or pellet grill. Anova makes a good sous vide, which is basically a water bath that slowly brings your meat to temp, without ever over cooking it. Meat looks boiled when it’s done, and it helps to dry it and toss it in a hot cast iron pan with a little oil or fat. Look in to smoke points of various oils, burnt olive oil is not a good flavor or scent. Pellet grills are awesome as they are like an outdoor wood fired oven. You won’t likely burn or char edges while cooking. You don’t even have to flip your meat unless you want grill marks. This coupled with an instant read thermometer and you’re in business.

Salt and pepper are great for seasoning, especially steaks. Always use kosher salt. Coat it generously on all sides and let it sit on a cutting board uncovered overnight.

There are a lot of differing opinions out there about marinading methods and letting meat sit on the counter before cooking, etc. I have not noticed a huge difference in prepping the night before or tossing chicken in a bowl with olive oil and seasoning while the grill is heating up. Just check it in the thickest part with your thermometer often and it will be good and juicy.

Shoot me a pm if you have any questions, I’d be glad to help. I’m no pro chef, but cooking is a passion of mine that I have put lots of time and research into.

Flipping it as little as possible, and also most times lower and slower is better. If you're talking about grilling lower and slower is still better to keep the moisture in but you have to get it piping hot to get that sear, baby! So crank it up high as shit and then turn it down right when you put the meat on

Find a good recipe and follow it. As you become more experienced you can adjust the recipe to your liking.

Cook a lot. The more you cook the more practice you get.

As for cooking meat: Always cook the meat at room temperature (leave the meat out of the fridge for 20 mins before cooking). Know the cut of meat and what cooking method is best for it. Know the seasoning and the amount you'll need per serving. Don't just practice cooking the meat, practice cooking the sauce too. And finally, rest for at least 5 minutes no longer than 10 minutes.

When it came to cooking steak, I've tried every method to achieving the desired result. Eventually, one will stick and will consistently get you there.

This is what worked for me:

1) Take steak out at least an hour before cooking time. (Cold steak will lead to uneven cooking)

2) Hot Pan. (Get your sear on.)

3) Season before placing onto pan. (I keep it simple with Salt and Pepper from a mill.)

4) Place steak and let it sit for a couple of minutes. (For me 3 minutes has been decent but varies based on thickness, of course.)

5) Turn to reveal that golden brown goodness.

6) Make sure to render the fat on the sides. (Great flavor)

7) Since I use a meat thermometer, I usually remove from pan when I get to around 125 degrees F or 52 degrees C for you sticklers out there. (Depending on preference you may want to go a bit higher for Medium, Medium Well, Well Done, I like mine medium rare.)

8) I let sit for 5 minutes. (I hone a knife while I wait.)

9) Profit.

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Again this is what works for me, some folks have different methods (i.e palm method.)

invest in a sous vide and a cast iron skillet, you'll never cook meat poorly again.

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The sous vide will perfectly cook the meat internally to however you prefer it, use the cast iron skillet to sear. it makes perfectly cooked steak every single time. Sous vide chicken remains juicy. Marinating your meats overnight in a vacuum sealed pouch or even a regular ziploc infuses all the flavors. it's foolproof

High heat. Put your meat on, immediately turn the heat down to low-medium. 45 seconds, flip it. Leave it be until that side's done. Flip it. Leave it be until it's done. Just walk away; you'll know when it's time to come back. Trust me.

I find first chicken breasts, pounding them just until they are an equal thickness all the way through will make a big difference. It will improve the texture and it will cook evenly. Marinating it in oil salt and pepper plus whatever else you like will help give it a more juicy texture.

As far as steaks this is my method: rub steak lightly with olive oil, season steak with a bit of garlic salt and freshly ground pepper from a hand held pepper grinder. No table salt or pepper. Get a sautee pan screaming hot and sear both sides of the steak until GBD (GOLDEN+BROWN=DELICIOUS). Transfer steak to essentially a baking sheet with foil layed down on it. (This will make clean up easier). Do not wrap the steak in foil. Place under broiler, flip steak so it cooks evenly, until desired temp is reached. You don't need a thermometer for this. Don't poke holes in your steak. It takes a few times to get the propper amount of time under the broiler figured out but you'll get it after about 3 attempts at most. Take the steak out before it's at the actual desired temp you want, and LET IT REST for a few minutes. The meat continues cooking when removed from the heat source. My average cook time for a fairly thick new york from the time it hits the pan to the time I take it out of the broiler is generally under 10 min. It's quick & my steaks are always amazing and perfect MR. If you like your steak above medium, please do not reproduce as that is a major clue that you're a complete idiot.

I've never really been bad at cooking so idk how credible I am but when it come to cooking steak seasoning is key, and everyone seasons their meat differently. What I think is best and how I personally season my steak is with a hot sauce (I recommend Tapatío) some soy sauce, seasoning salt (I personally like the seasoning mix Adobe which you can find in your local Spanish market) and I let it marinate in the fridge for about an hour, it comes out moist and the soy sauce and seasoning salt mixes perfectly with the hot sauce leaving it with just a perfect hint of spice

Ok so here's one big tip. Rasual heat is a big thing. You have to let the meat rest after you take it out/off of what you're cooking it on. The heat will carry over and cook it more.

Other tips.
Brine your pork and poultry. Water, salt, a little bit of sugar and spices if you like. Do it for a minimum of 2 hours. Best results over night. Do this especially if you thawed the meat out. The meat will be juicy and be flavorful even on the inside. Don't salt beef unless your going to cook it right away. It makes it lose moisture. Get a meat thermometer if you want it a certain temp and are afraid of messing it up. Never undercook poultry. Get a good cast iron skillet. If you want soft pull apart meat then slow cooking it is for you. High temp at first 400-450 and then drop it to 280-320 for 1 1/2 hrs to 3. Add liquid to it if you want. Cover it in foil if you want it to fall apart. This applies to ribs if you want it to fall off the meat. Take your time and have fun. You'll learn eventually

I live in an apartment and am unable to use a grill. I have found that have a good cast iron pan is one of the best tools for cooking most meats. For steak, a reverse searing method is what I prefer. Steak gets salted and peppered and goes in the oven at a low temperature to get the internal temperature up without cooking it too much. Then into a hot cast iron pan with butter, garlic, and rosemary. Sear both sides while basting it with the butter until it reaches a medium rare feel. Take it off and let it rest for 5-10 minutes and that usually produces an excellent steak. My preferences as far as flavor and doneness go, but it can be adjusted for whatever preferences you may have.

A proper BBQ for one, sear for 2 min.a side to start then use a good thermometer and rest the steaks in foil for 10. Min to finish.
Or you could do them sous vide for an even cook but I like mine with some char.

Get rid of excess moisture. Coat your seasoning evenly, if possible salt prior and let it sit. Get that pan nice and hot, you want to hear that seductive sizzle. Get familiar with the weight, that will dictate how long you need to cook to get that delicious flavor. The more color the more flavor you want a nice browning. Those little bits stuck on the pan is your fond; more savory flavor you shouldn't live without. Add butter, wine, or even beer to loosen them up add an incredible cohesion to compliment the meat. Imagine that irresistible aroma, flip then add herbs on top to intensify. Baste the liquid fond over your herbs. After you finish cooking that captivating meat resist the urge, a little patience leaves more to be desired and allows the liquid in the meat to retain itself. After the restraint you will have the most captivating flavor accompanied with a stunning aroma. Finish with a decadent sauce and you will have yourself the best prepared meat you can dream of at the tips of your cutlery.

Start by picking out a quality cut of meat. I like to buy a prime cut of either ribeye or NY strip, but choice cuts work if you are on a budget, so long as there is a decent amount of intramuscular fat (see “marbling”) in the steak.

Also buy butter, rosemary, thyme, and garlic.

Let the steak sit outside of the fridge for about 30 min before cooking. This allows it to come up to room temp so that it cooks more evenly throughout.

Get a pan ripping hot. Rub the steak all over with oil (one with a high burning point like grapeseed oil or avocado oil), but do not put any oil on the pan itself. We do this because we want to achieve what’s called the maillard effect, where the meat develops a nice crunchy brown crust on the outside, giving us extra texture and sealing in the juices. To do this, we need to make sure there isn’t too much oil in the pan (remember, we don’t want the steak to boil, we want it to sear).

Season steak liberally with salt and pepper right before putting it in the pan. When laying into the pan, lay the steak away from you to avoid getting splashed with any oil.

Generally when cooking the steak, you’ll want to have a meat thermometer to make sure you achieve the perfect temp. If you don’t have one, you can also judge doneness by pressing your finger onto the steak itself (but this method requires some experience). General guidelines for a 1 lb steak are 5-6 min first side, and 3-4 min second side.

Once the first side of the steak has achieved a nice crust all over, flip it over (NOTE: We only flip the steak once during the entire cooking process. This is it!). Once flipped, let it sear for about 1-2 min (depending on size) before adding a knob of butter, a clove of garlic, some thyme and rosemary. Let these herbs infuse with the melted butter and then begin spooning butter onto the top of the steak (tilt the pan towards you, and use a spoon to scoop the butter and ladle onto the steak).

Once the steak is about 10 degrees below desired doneness, take it off and let it rest. I typically take the steak off at 125 degrees F, because I like my steaks medium rare (~135 degrees F). Remember that the steak continues to cook even after it is taken off the pan, which is why we always remove it a bit before it reaches desired doneness.
KEEP IN MIND: letting the steak rest is probably the most important part of this whole process. It allows the steak to finish cooking and gives all of the juices time to redistribute throughout the steak. If you cut open too soon, all of the juices will run out and you’ll be left with a dry, crappy steak. I’d suggest about 10 minutes rest time before cutting into it.

Steak: Give it salt and pepper before cooking. Heat the pan to high temperature (be patient and let it heat all the way) and sear it on both sides. Then turn down the heat to a little over middle and give it 1-3 minutes on each side, depending on the size of the steak, and how cooked you prefer it.

Chicken: Marinate it with olive oil, garlic, lemon, and your favourite spices. Then fry it on mid-high temperature.

For stove top, get an instant read thermometer, a cast iron pan, and properly defrost your steak. Season liberally at least 10 minutes before you put it on and let it rest at least 10, covered, before cutting against the grain into it. There's a lot more, but it depends on what you are making, how you want it, and how thick it is.

For crispy chicken skin, let it dry out in the fridge awhile, loosen the skin on the breasts and try to get seasoning under there. Also cut around the drumstick bone and pop off that kneecap shit for a nice finger handle once it’s cooked.

My steak secret is no secret, it’s a popular cheat and it’s called the reverse sear. Basically you bring it slowly up to temp in the oven. I augment this step by topping the meat with chopped shallots and a chunk of butter. Pull it out at 110f (it’s going to be gross looking) brush off the shallots and sear it in a preheated pan on high with a bit of oil and butter to get the browning. One minute a side, and then wait another ten minutes before you touch it or do anything.

Don't be afraid to flip it more then once, yes even steak. Idk why people say to only flip it once, this is a very common misconception and you can get a much nicer and more even temperature by flipping it multiple times without sacrificing how juicy it is.

To start, make sure you find steak with good marbling, that is the red meat and fat make a "marble cake" sort of look. You can find references for the kind of marbling you should go for.

I usually set my grill at 400°f, piping hot. I salt and pepper the steaks heavily and put them on the grill. DO NOT TOUCH THEM for at LEAST 4 minutes. After 4 to 6 minutes depending on the doneness you want, flip them and do not touch for another 4 to 6 minutes, but make your cooking time on the second side slightly shorter than the first due to the center already being cooked.

Remove fron grill and let it sit on a plate covered in tinfoil for about 3 minutes. This allows the meat to loosen up and become more tender.

Eat it like this, or if you wish to present it to a party, you can cut it into slices with a very sharp knife. Treat the meat as if it were your child (Very bad example but you get my point), very carefully and deliberately place your cuts. The motion should be half way into the meat going forward, and slicing the peice off coming back, 2 strokes.

Serve on a plate with horseradish, or bernaise sauce over top, garnish with thyme sprigs.

Meat is so dead simple, but knowing some of the intricacies helps a lot. For example, how you cut the meat is just as important as how you cook it. If you butcher the meat after you cook it, it will become tough to chew. My favorite kind of steak is new york strip. There are many ways to check for doneness, but my personal favorite it timing.

Moist and juicy baked chicken? Most cooks seem to overcook chicken and it's dry. BUT coat the entire chicken with olive oil, then sprinkle seasoning over it before baking. The oil cooks the skin crispy, seals in all the moistness and before long, the chicken is golden brown, crispy skin, delicious juicy tender meat on the inside.

For me, it's being comfortable with knowing that things can be a little pink and still safe to eat. Get a decent thermometer and start using it and pull the meat when it's safe to eat regardless of how it looks. No more dry pork chops and leathery steaks.

For chicken, dark meat is way more forgiving and tastes better. Just don't bother with white meat at all and you are 50% of the way to having better chicken.

Depends on the cut of meat actually, as well as how you wish to cook it and what you like to eat- but as a general guideline for a Sirloin / Tenderloin

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PAN FRY - Cook for 1- 2 mins - on each side - to seal in the juices. Then turn it every minute up to a max of 6-8 minutes for a medium rare / medium (may take slightly longer if its a very thick cut)

Take it off the heat and leave it inn the pan for a minute or so after that and then cut it right in the middle.

You should see it graduating to pink in the middle, and depending on how you like it, either eat it or whack it on again. Once you've done this a few times you will get used to the process and the timings for your cooker and the cuts of meat you buy.

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BBQ / Grill - same as above really, the key thing is to seal it in first, and keep it on a high rack you don't want to be eating charcoal.

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For chicken - its really easy - it takes about 20 minutes in the oven / grill as a very general guide. Maybe 25.

Depends if you like juicy chicken order chicken. Not much more to tell really.

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Source : I eat a lot of meat in my garden and have been BBQ'ng for a long time.

Theres no hard and fast rule because each cut of meat is different. IMHO.

Grilling chicken is very difficult to do properly. Chicken is not built to be grilled, so inexperienced chefs burn the outside, char it with flare-ups from all the subcutaneous fat, and leave the middle completely raw.

I love to smoke ribs, briskets, pork shoulders, etc., but I could never get the food cooked right with a wood-fueled smoker. Beside, it’s a pain in the ass to manage the temperature - you constantly have to open and close vents, add fuel, spray the firebox with water to cool things down, etc. Over an 8-12-hour smoke, that’s a lot of work - often in the early morning hours if you plan to eat mid-afternoon for the holidays. It all changed when I bought an electric smoker. Plug it in, set the temperature, add wet wood chips and a little bit of apple juice. Aside from refilling the chips a few times, it’s “set it and forget it.” 8-12 hours later, the food is amazing!

BTW - a properly smoked turkey will change your life (as will a deep fried turkey but that’s a different story).

I also think about the extra racks in the smoker as “bonus” racks. You’re already heating the box, so you might as well add some other stuff. Smoke a chicken to eat later in the week. Smoked corn on the cob is AMAZING! If you plan accordingly, you can make more than what you need and end up with food to last for a while.

I’ve also found a pressure cooker is a Godsend. (I was nervous about them because I head the horror stories of people who were burned by exploding pressure cookers. Today’s pressure cookers - mine is electric - are much safer.). For tender ribs, you just add a little bit of diluted BBQ sauce (1/2 BBQ sauce - 1/2 water) in the bottom, stack the ribs like Jenga (except with air spaces), and set the timer. Depending upon how long it takes the pressure cooker to build up pressure, you’ll have the most delicious ribs in about an hour (15 minutes to pressurize - 45 minutes to cook). Take ‘em out, slather then with BBQ sauce, and give them a minute on the grill or in the oven to heat things up and - voila - amazing BBQ ribs in no time.

First: Do it with love and passion
Second: Let salt and pepper get in meat before you start cooking it, lets say 2 hours before cooking salt and pepper the meat so it can get in properly.
Third: Cook it on slow fire so it get really juicy and soft inside and outside then turn up the heat

It can get a bit technical, but The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has explanations of why techniques work. For example, steaks should be cooked low and slow first, to get the inside to the right temperature, then go with a super high heat to get the crust.

An instant read (electronic) thermometer helps a lot. Takes the guesswork out of doneness.

For chicken, I like going with dark meat pieces with skin and bone still in. Gives you more leeway in cooking time and temperature. (Chicken breast can get tough and dry if over cooked.). Marinate in something - could be some soy sauce, sugar, garlic, and ginger (salt, sweet, spices) - overnight, then put in an oven for about 35 minutes.

For chicken breast cut the breast in half or at the very least thin out the thick end to better match the thin end of the chicken. This speeds up cooking and gives you more even temps.

With steak putting salt on it hours before you cook it does wonders for tenderness. Reverse searing a steal is the most failsafe way to cook a steak and all you need is an oven at 225°, thermometer, and a on to sear it in. Google the details.

She used to work as a cook at a local restaurant. There's utterly no way I'll ever cook a steak as good as she can. I get it perfectly medium rare with a crispy outer and she flavors it juuuuuust right.

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Only hints I can give you is to do a Silverside is to put that chunk of Silverside into the slow cooker on low for 10 hours with 1 and a 1/2 coffee mugs of water. That's it. 10 hours on low with water and let it go. It comes out perfect!

If you ever want to not think too much about what you are doing and would rather try to wing it all, a very good rule of thumb for me has been: "Better to undercook than overcook". So in practice, if you are feeling unsure about how much your meat has cooked, give it less rather than more. This frame of mind works very well for me, because slightly undercooked meat tastes a lot better than overcooked meat. So either you get slightly undercooked meat or perfectly cooked meat, which are both better than overcooked meat.

Not a penis owner, and I am a simple lady (and also a very fucking poor one) so when we have steak I do it really plain and simple.

Side note: not a chef. Nor a cook. I don't really cook for pleasure either unless the mood strikes me. SO DON'T COME AT ME OKAY!

Don't cook a frozen or chilled steak (yes, some people freeze their steaks if they're not going to have them in the next week. Some people namely being me. I repeat - don't @ me) if you need to defrost a steak, do so in the fridge, and then leave it out for about 3 or 4 hours before cooking it (covered though cos bugs)

I put a bit of butter in a frying pan and prep the steak by trimming off any excess fat. I do keep some on though because I like crispy meat fat.

I rub salt and pepper on one side of the steak, flip and repeat on the other side. If ya feeling fancy, you can out some herb stuff in the pan with the butter (I hear Rosemary is good). I tend not to and put some diced mushrooms in instead because we love those silken bits of fungus. Then put the steak in the pan and leave it for 5-7 minutes, flip and do the same again.

Am I right? Probably not. Does it taste good? I reckon so! And I've not had complaints either so either people are lying to me, or I do okay with steak.

Chicken is really easy. Again, I tend not to marinate because usually I'm shredding the chicken anyway to add it into whatever else. For a whole chicken, it usually tells you somewhere on the packaging how long it needs to be cooked for. I tend to put a whole chicken in a glass cooking dish thingy, sprinkle some salt on the top and a bit of oil in the glass tray. I also put some garlic (pre-prepped cos I'm lazy AF), mushrooms again, and root vegetables chopped and kind of just lay them around the chicken. Pre-heat the oven on a low-medium heat (I usually do 170-180°C) cover the dish in foil (shinier side down) and put it in for about an hour and a half, gently stab it and spoon the juices over. Once the juices are running clear the chicken is cooked. Then I take the foil off and put it back in for however long (about another half hour. It all depends on the size of the chicken and honestly I just guess with times and go off of how it looks and smells and when the juices run clear I know it's okay)

Or, I put it in my slow cooker. Same way as I said with the oven, but I leave it on high for 4 hours or low for about 6.

If it's like chicken breasts - again, same way, but I tend to put the oven on higher (190-200) and for about an hour. Then shred the breastsis and throw a sauce on top. Turn the heat down... WAY down and leave it in the oven for however long.

Again, I've had no complaints and no one has died or gotten sick from my cooking.

Salt meat either less than a minute before it goes on a grill/pan/etc, or more than 2 hours before. Do not salt for more than 24 or so hrs.
Salt will draw moisture from the meat. In a short time period, that means the surface will be wet, and your sear will be horrible. After a little while, however, the meat will slowly begin to draw the moisture back in. The salt will break down the myosin, tenderising the meat, as well as seasoning it. If you leave it too long, however, the myosin in the meat will begin to crosslink and the texture of the meat will begin to resemble ham/bacon (which is salt cured, funnily enough); while this is great for ham, it's bloody weird in a steak.

Cook fatty, tough, and cartiligenous meat low and slow, cook lean meats extremely fast.
If you want to cook something in a sauce, don't waste steak or chicken breast. Use thighs, or cuts from tough, heavily worked muscles, and cook them slowly with moisture (a sauce or a braise; things like curries/stews/etc). Although meat dries out as it cooks, collagen in the sinews etc will break down into gelatin, which will give the sensation of richness and moisture. Along with rendered fats etc., this means thigh cuts etc. will taste rich and juicy far past the point a lean chicken breasat will turn into a hockey puck. Cook it for more than an hour or two, and the meat will start to pull apart, and tenderise further in that regard. Conversely, for a steak or chicken breast, we want to cook it much faster, we want to really sear it.

For a good sear, use a big, hot pan, and only a few pieces of meat.
Searing meat is about getting the heat into the surface of the meat as fast as possible, to get the Maillard reactions (a.k.a. browning or caramelisation, though the latter's actually a different reaction) going without overcooking the middle (ignore anyone that talks about sealing in the juices, it's a myth). If it cooks slowly, your meat will be tough and overcooked inside by the time the outside's brown. Dry your meat off with a paper towel, and preheat the pan (when water evaporates, it takes heat with it, so a wet surface will be a cooler surface). Add your oil, and let it heat until it begins to shimmer; note, don't use extra virgin olive oil or butter here, as they will smoke (save them for low temperature cooking, or finishing a dish before serving). When you add the meat, don't crowd the pan. Every piece of meat is going to pull heat out of the pan, so to keep the pan hot, you want fewer bits of meat; aim for about 1/3rd of the pan surface covered by meat. Leave your meat to cook, don't immediately prod it or move it around; with a hot pan, it should only take a minute or two for the outside of the meat to firm up and pull away from the pan, but if you try to move flip it before then, it will probably stick and tear. There's some other tricks here, like cooking sous-vide and doing reverse sears, but that can wait until you're a bit more confident

Cook it less than you want it to finish as, and then LET YOUR MEAT REST!
Seriously, if you do a steak or something, when you pull it off the pan, it's still cooking in it's own heat. If you wait til the inside is as done as you expect it to be on the plate, it will overcook, and then there's no saving it. So, pull it a little early (this is a real knack that comes with experience if doing by eye, but you can BUY A MEAT THERMOMETER, and know the right time analytically), then cover it with al-foil and let it rest for 5-10 minutes (use this time do some veges or something for a side dish, or make a quick pan sauce by deglazing the pan with a little wine, butter and some aromatics). This has a bonus in letting the juices equalise out in the meat. During cooking, the muscle fibres contract, and squeeze out the various juices. You'll end up with drier fibres in a soup of meatjuice (myoglobin, rendered fats and gelatin... all the good stuff), like someones wrung out a towel; if you cut into the meat then, the juice will go all over your plate, and the fibres will stay dry. If you let it rest, the fibres will relax, and take up a lot more of the juice again, so the flavour goes in your mouth not on your plate.

Other errata
- Maillard reactions (browning) are the reactions between amino acids (what makes up proteins), and sugar/starches. As such, they go faster if there is excess sugar present. If you dredge your meat in flour, or use a sweat marinade/glaze, they will brown faster, possibly too fast if you're not expecting it! This browning also goes slower if it's acidic (and faster if it's basic), so if you want to have browned meat, hold off on adding any lemon juice/wine/vinegar to the pan until the browning is done.
- Most marinades don't penetrate into the meat more than a few mm. Unless it's fairly thinly cut, most meat won't pick up that much flavour from a marinade, and you'll get a better return on your efforts for using a glaze etc as you cook it instead. The exceptions are marinades high in salt or sugar (in which case osmotic pressure will draw the marinade in somewhat) or milk-based marinades; the latter are fantastic if you want to have tender meat for fried dishes like schnitzel. DON'T use highly acidic marinades (or ones containing certain proteing-degrading enzymes, like pineapple juice) for more than an hour or two; longer, and your meat will first toughen, then turn to mush (in the enzymatic case, it will go straight to the mush stage).
- Learn how to make a pan gravy or sauce (wine, browned butter, pepper gravy, whatever). It's delicious, and always impressive to plate up a steak with e.g. a red wine jus, and yet is stupidly easy.
- When doing a slow stew/braise, nothing replaces time. Ideally, you should have 2+ hours of cooking. However, if that's not possible, cut your meat into smaller bits, cutting across the grain, rather than along it, and also add a tsp or so of powdered gelatine to the sauce. Your meat will seem tenderer, and your sauce richer and fuller, than it should be.

Chicken is easy. Doesn't need too much time and just check that it isn't pink on the inside. If it gets too dry you are cooking it too long. If it's juicy but pink, you got salmonella. Just give it a couple of tries and you'll learn to cook it perfect every time. Then you can experiment with lemon chicken, or chicken with tomatoes and mozzarella in the oven. You can marinate it and grill it.

For steaks I have no experience. It's pork country here. But I think you just need to salt/pepper it and cook it for some time. Check google for how long.

As far as learning things, just practice and trying new recipes over the years. I also have the benefit of working for a cook for a while. But never stop learning basically, like all things! I cook a lot more chicken than red meat lately. But for chicken that can't, almost, can't fail:

-butteryfly the breasts

-put on a parchment lined sheet tray

-season with whatever

-cook for 15 mins on 425f

Comes out perfectly cooked everytime

If you're looking for a good burger though definetly go with a smash burger:

-make 4oz balls of ground beef

-get a cast iron pan or grill top ripping hot

-add oil to pan to coat

-place meat ball in pan, then smash it really flat with the backend of your spatualla until they're about 4in in diameter

Use salt before. Use very little after. Thick cuts will cook slower. Know which kind of meat you are cooking. You can eat beef undercooked. Do not eat chicken undercooked. Remember that pork with a lot of fat will be greasy, and often taste better crispy. Use butter and olive oil. When cutting steaks cut them when they are slightly frozen or cold. But do not cook them until they are room temp. Season and Marinate. Marinate with salty/vinegary sauces or seasonings as this will break down the connective tissue and lead to tender meats. Cut against the grain after and before cooking. It will also lead to extremely tender meats. There's a lot more. This is just what I can think of.

For beef/fish I prefer dry seasonings as well. Doing wet marinades for chicken/turkey/duck. Additionally, give your meat time to really absorb the spices. Also if you're thinking of doing whole turkeys a brine took my whole turkey making experince up. I haven't had a dry turkey in years.

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Cooking method wise resist the urges to constantly turn and flip meat. This is especially important on burgers. Timers and therometers are must haves. Don't forget to let your meat rest!

Get a cast iro skillet. Cook chicken on medium high first to sear, then low and slow. Play with seasoning. For steaks, #1 dont buy cheap cuts, #2 season with salt and crust in pepper (and i rub some espresso grounds on there too!) #2 Set oven at 250 and let those suckers in there for 15- 20 mins, #3 sear in a hot pan with a little butter on high on each side for about 1- 2 minutes of till browned

BBQ - Lower temperatures and longer cooking times. Don't rush the meat! Let the inside of the meat get hot as well as the outside. That goes for all meats, burgers, sausages etc.

Oven - similar to BBQ but use tinfoil lightly covering the meat after a while to stop it drying out and getting tough.

Pan-fry - very hot griddle pan, sear both sides and don't forget that a steak will still cook a little when you remove it. For chicken, same but make sure you cut open a little too check it's not pink. Again, don't overcook...check inside!

For me pork is the best meat to cook. It's best served fresh so if you are butcher you are in an advantage. Marinating the meat is as important as cooking it. Best choice would be fresh garlic coriander, oregano, pepper and we also have this spice called vegeta from dry vegetables. And the best way to cook the meat is in BBQ with wood and charcoal. The level of cooked meat depends on you, for me the best one is medium to medium rare.

Reverse sear everything. Even if you are going to put it on the grill. Slow and low temp in the oven or preferably a smoker. 200-250 F for as long as it takes to bring it to temp. Use a thermometer to monitor temps.

4.) Sear on both sides at a very high heat. Use a grill, frying pan or flat top.

5.) Lower your heat to keep the smoke down and cook to a medium-rare. IMO, you’re going to want a bloodless, yet pink center.

Aaaaaand grilling Chicken...

A.) Lower heat is better. If you cook the shit out of chicken, it becomes dry and tough.

B.) Get a marinating bowl with spices like Tony’s Chacheres’s, fresh garlic, Adobo Chicken (pollo) seasoning and some olive or coconut oil.

C.) Lightly coat in the oil and evenly season with your blend of spices.

D.) As you place your chicken into your pan, or on your grill, it will stick. You want it to stay there until it cooks itself free from being stuck, then flip it over. Don’t ever cover and steam your chicken breasts without searing them first, because they will sweat out protein and nutrients instead of being sealed into the chicken breast.

E.) Put some Balsamic Vinegar in a cheap clean spray bottle and spray the chicken lightly, but completely. Allow the balsamic to cook down onto the skin of the chicken.

F.). Ensure internal temperature is at least 165 at the thickest part. Let rest, then slice and serve with some steamed veggies and brown rice.

Always let your steaks get as close to room temp as possible before cooking. Always let your chicken rest a couple minutes after cooking before serving. You don’t need a meat thermometer if you know what you’re doing. There is also a method of checking the temp of a steak by touching your thumb pad while your thumb is touching each of your fingers seperately. No touch=rare, thumb to index finger=mid rare, thumb to middle finger=medium, thumb to ring finger=mid well, thumb to pinky=well. 60% of the time it works every time

Dry your meat. This little thing makes a huge difference. Dry your meat before putting it in the pan. I use paper from kitchen rolls. Instead of a light broiling, the meat will caramelize and unstuck from the pan on its own, even without oil or butter. This makes for a better flavor.

When frying chicken breast make sure it's dry af on the outside to get that crust. Dry it with a cloth, salt it, let it sit, dry it again, then fry. (Tip: quickly kill off bacteria in the cloth by pouring boiling hot water over it.)

But: don't always use breast. It's lean and easy to handle, but wings and thighs are actually tastier and more forgiving.

Always remember to use enough salt, pepper and other spices for the whole piece of meat. It will stay on the outside (unless marinated), but it has to season the whole bite.

Chicken - If you're making something that requires the chicken breast to be sliced (fajitas), first butterfly the breast and pound it with a meat mallet so it's a uniform thickness and season with salt and pepper. Cook it up (it won't take long as it's now thin) then lest it rest a couple minutes. You will notice how juicy and flavorful the chicken is compared to slicing up raw chicken and cooking it in pieces. OR, even better but takes longer, cook bone-in breast (seasoned) in the oven and slice up that motherfucker after letting it rest. I prefer this over a wok but I don't have a gas stove to properly use one.

Steak - Look for steak with marbling, fat is flavor. You want those little white lines.

A butcher tipped me to buy it as close to the best before date as possible, and it's served me well so far.

If it's a quality steak (not a thin marinating steak, etc) season it with kosher salt (you should be using kosher salt in your kitchen primarily, I'm confident you'll find it better to work it) and pepper and leave it in the fridge uncovered for a day or two or three (use your discretion depending on its freshness) and flip it over at least once. This will give a nice crust when searing on a cast iron skillet. Cooking steak on cast iron is my favorite method, but I don't often buy steaks that would warrant a reverse sear.

And just like the chicken, cook whole first for dishes requiring sliced beef.

Fire kitchen, proper pan and some love. Make sure the pan is very hot and lower the fire a little bit when putting the meat. Wait untill it begins to sweat and turn it. You can put some spices now if you want, but not salt or it might start leaking water, we don't want that. You don't have to wait for this side as long as for the other side, you will see it starts sweating much faster. Take the meat out and add salt to taste.

In general don't be afraid of using high fires or high settings in your kitchen, you don't want your meat leaking.

I started to put my pressure regulator on more often. Bare and raw is good, but now, I always use protection.
Also, the water boiled off too quickly making my internals less hot to cook nicely.
So, as a cooker, I always use my weighted pressure regulator whistle.

If you're putting on more than salt and pepper on a single piece of meat (if it's not a dry rub) you're probably over seasoning. When it's ground anything goes.

If it's ground, may as well throw in some sausage.

The only two things you should ever cook a steak in are a cast iron skillet or a grill, or both if you want to do a reverse sear.

It needs to rest before cutting. At least 5 minutes, preferably a bit longer. As long as it can wait while remaining hot.

Don't listen to dipshits that tell you "a well cooked steak doesn't need sauce." I don't care if Gordon Ramsay cooked my steak on the queen's ass, I'm going to make my own sauce, and I'm going to eat roughly 2/3 of my steak with it. I just LIKE the taste of steak with a sauce.

They're both really good and can easily be tuned to your own tastes. Personally I like 3 parts ketchup/garlic mayo 2 parts Worcestershire, and then I just coat the top of it with black pepper and stir in.

Grill Tip: Propane grill, get it at 350, throw on steaks, light a cigarette. When you're done, flip them, light another cigarette. When you're done, take them off. Perfection.

This is one of the few times I get to smoke a cigarette, and it's an awesome timer.

Don't smoosh your burgers flat, let them be a bit thick. When it's time to flip, flip them once, smoosh it a little bit, then don't touch it till it's done. For chicken, use a wet marinade on the grill, a dry rub in the oven. For steaks, well I'm not very good at cooking steaks...

Learning to cook has been one of the funnest journeys I've taken. Honestly, take some tips from basics with babish on youtube to get you started. Season everything. Use heat and oil appropriately. Light meat chicken is better with skin. Steak is best in a pan instead of a grill, olive oil, butter seasoning and herb of choice.

1) Use a mallet or other heavy object to pound chicken breast into a uniform thickness. This means it will cook evenly and you won’t have a large piece that’s cooked, and a thin piece that’s crusty and dry on the other end.

2) BAKE IT IN THE OVEN. And let it sit for 5 minutes when you take it out before cutting it. This locks the juice in and is the difference between dry ass shit chicken and juicy incredible yummy chicken. It’s a game changer. 20-25 minutes at 400 in the oven, rest for 5 minutes.

Generally I like to salt the meat before cooking it. Pepper should be done after the cooking because high heat can cause a wierd taste.

General process:

Salt your meat before cooking it - this creates a better crust

Pepper should be added after the cooking process since it can get burned

Oil the meat on the cutting board - this helps with finding the right amount of fat. Usually I use Olive oil, this is often discouraged because of the lower smoke point, but I like the taste and you just have to be careful to not cook it too hot (If the pan is smoking, it was too hot)

Cook the meat with medium/strong heat until you have a nice crust

Now you steak/chicken is either done, or you know your desired core temperatures (for chicken AND steak) user a thermometer and put it in the oven at 100°C

The secret of juice chicken breast is the right core temperature - too low and it is still pink in the middle, too high and its not juice anymore. The difficult part: the "juiceness tempearture range" with chicken is quite narrow compared to steaks

With some expecrience you can guess the "doneness" of your meat by poking it with your finger. This takes some experience, at the beginning I would use a meat thermometer (there are funk/wifi thermometers, so you don't habe to sit next to the oven)

Get a cast iron skillet and learn how to take xare of it. Check out flea markets for a vintage, name brand skillet such as Griswold in good condition. High sides keep the splatter down. A splash of water and putting the lid on will melt cheese on your burger in seconds.

Anthony Bourdain mentioned not cutting open your meat before or as soon as you take it off the grill because it’s still cooking inside and you will dry it out that way. Instead, wait 5 minutes before taking a knife to it. Good advice.

The easiest way to cook juicy chicken is to either actually cook it in a dish that requires it to be in a liquid, or to coat with something and make a crustc even easier if you deep fry it (though I never do it because Im already trying to loose weight but hey, if you hit the gyn daily go ahead)

The key to all of it is searing it quickly for flavor and to keep the juices in, and then finishing it slowly.

Let me give you 2 examples, lets say you wanna make some curry, you roast some spices in the pan, then fry some more in the oil you add and on high heat give the meat a good colour before taking it out, finishing your curry and adding it back in after the coconut milk so it can cook with it. It’s gonna be S U C C ulent as hell.

Or if you want some meat seperately for a good salad maybe, spice the meat up, again give it a good hard fry in the pan and then put it in the oven at just about 180 C for s few minutes, your oven performance may vary so watch out.

Depending on the thinness of the slices you can also just let them rest sonewhere and cover them so their own heat finishes them (this is risky, might still wanna heat em up later to make sure) I do this only when I fry already thinly sliced meat for salads.

Oh and one last tip: cumin, I think it’s cumin in english, just google translate for kurkuma, adds AMAZING flavor to chicken and potato.

For steak its the reverse sear method. Put your steak in the oven at 200 for approx 20 mins, or until the temp reaches 100F. When your steak is around 88 degrees heat up your cast iron and melt butter. Add garlic in there. Take the steak out of the oven at 100 and put it in the pan, but make sure the pan is piping hot. Add rosemary to the pan. Cook on each side for about a minute, using a spoon to baste the steak with garlic/rosemary/butter from the pan. I personally also sear the edges but you dont have to. Once the temp reaches 110 to 115, put the steak on a rack overtop of a plate and let sit for about 10 minutes. Makes a perfect medium steak everytime. If you want medium rare or rare just adjust the time to match the desire temps.

I know this probably isn't in the spirit of the post, but when I bought my Big Green Egg my cooking completely changed. My chicken had always been either raw or dry and my steaks were just "meh." Now my chicken is moist and perfect and my steaks top anything I can buy at the finest chop houses (to my tastes, at least.) I almost feel like the BGE is almost cheating - I have to work pretty hard to screw it up. I'm not here to push any brands, so I'll say any of that style cooker - it's very forgiving and can really take your cooks over the top.

Temperature control and KISS. For steak all you need is salt and pepper... and a really hot pan, preferably cast iron. Hot n quick is best. Too slow and the steak 'bleeds out' causing alot of liquid to be in the pan. Then you end up with a light grey steamed steak :(.

Chicken is similar. Cook it quickly just until its not pink in the middle. Overcooking will dry it out and ruin it. Also use a meat hammer to flatten out filets... do not try to slice chicken breasts into thinner slices. And dont go from the fridge to the pan. Let the chicken get closer to room temp by leaving it out on a plate for 20-30 minutes before cooking. Don't worry, it won't spoil that quickly... but no more than an hour.

Most recipes involve cooking food at one temp for convenience. Generally though most meats and also many veggies are better if you cook for a longer period at a lower temp and a shorter period at a higher temp. Get the meat reasonably cooked in the oven in a low temp then sear it a very high temp.

Season the steak well. Rest the steak before cutting into it. A little butter near the end. If you are going to use a thermometer, use one that you can have in the steak while it's in the oven, pierce the steak before placing in the oven and set alarm for around 5 degrees lower than you're aiming for and don't pull thermometer out until you're done resting the steak or the juices will come out with it.

Look up reverse sear on YouTube, basically pre heat the oven to 275 and stick your meat thermometer in the steak, and put it in the oven for about 45 mins until it hits an internal temp of 125, then pull steak out, rest it for 10 mins, heat up your grill or pan on high, sear both sides , about a minute to two mins per side, then eat.

Seasoning is where a ton of the flavor can come from, don't ignore it. At the bare minimum of seasoning you can do 50/50 salt pepper but there's a lot of flexibility to it depending on what you're cooking. Also just because it doesn't look cooked doesn't mean it isn't; I always used to cook it until it was dark (not burnt)and appeared fully cooked through but I realized all I was doing was drying it out. When you finish cooking try to cover the meat so it stays insulated and continues cooking, it keeps a lot of the juices in it as well so it's never a bad idea in my opinion. Lastly, and I can't stress this enough, don't flip the food every 2 seconds because you'll lose a lot of the juices and flavor by doing this

Get some Weber brand Chicago Steak seasoning. It's basically salt & extra stuff, and it's delicious. I use it in place of salt & pepper on beef, pork, & most side veggies.

Fillet chicken breasts then cover with Saran Wrap & pound to 1/4" thick. 9 times out of 10 when we cook chicken breast it gets diced and used in stuff like jambalaya, fettuccine Alfredo, Kung Pao chicken, etc. and so doesn't need the slicing & hammering. I rarely cook breasts whole unless they're getting breaded & fried for something like chicken Marsala and then they always get the fillet & pound treatment.

Ground beef! Buy 80/20 for burgers, 90/10 for things like taco meat or spaghetti & meat sauce. For burgers, do not knead the meat to add in spices or for any other reason; it makes the meat tough. Handle it just enough to form the patties and season the outside.

I spent last summer learning how to cook a perfect medium-rare steak. I will take that secret to the grave, but starting out by watching Gordon Ramsay's videos is a good idea. Learn your own methods from there.

I'm a pretty good cook, been a chef and cook for fun aswell. Everything the top 20 comments are saying is true. But you can't rush experience and you definitely don't want to. Test things out or even get a decent steak cut, slice it into strips and try different seasonings (not just salt and pepper) and maybe even different marinades if that's what you fancy.

The key to it is finding what you like, because everyone likes it slightly different and finding the best for you is definitely an enjoyable process :)

I love a good onglet cut marinated with fresh lime and a sprinkle of cinnamon then paired with either a nice pint of Belgium or a good Red. But that's what I like, many won't.

My secret is passion for good food along with fresh and high quality ingredients. I only buy meat from my region. Yes it is a little bit more expensive but i never cheap out on food, i think its to important. I also try to improve everytime i cook something. You have to be open minded and willing to try out new techniques and equipment. I get my new ideas from the internet or just from my fantasies. Sometimes i change some ingrediends in one of my recepies and it tastes not that great like i imagined, but i would never know if i never tried.
Also you can change the flavor of your meat so much with just modify your marinade a little bit.
Or keep it classy with just a bit of salt and pepper...
Just try out an you see whats going along with your taste and whats not.

Best thing to do to avoid any issues is to grill thinner pices of meat. I like medium well or well done steak. A thick arse steak will be tough and chewy when cooked to my liking, but a think steak will cook all the way through in a fraction of time. Same with chicken breasts. Butterfly the gigantic ones and it allows you to season more area and cook it faster without drying it out. Dark meat chicken you can cook till kingdom come and it wont be dry. Anything with bones will take a little longer

Professional chef here at a steak restaurant. Hoping I can provide some insight here (for steak at least).

For steak, smoking hot pan (no oil), rub oil on the meat and season. Put the steak in the pan for around 4 minutes for medium rare - generally in my experience of steak cuts, this time will be sufficient. A minute or so each side of 4 minutes for either rare or well done. Every minute of cooking, flip the steak.

Finally, rest on some tissue or meat board for a couple of minutes before serving on the plate. This is key!

Number one is to leave it on the grill without moving the meat around. I have a “one flip” rule, where once the meat is on, I only flip it once. That, and heat control are really important. No shame in using a meat thermometer either to prevent undercooking/overcooking.

There are a lot of really great videos on YouTube to check out when cooking certain dishes/meats, which help, too. The benefit of a video as opposed to an online recipe is you get to see the food being made and the chef typically gives advice as they go.

Cast Iron Skillet (preheated in oven). Cook meat @ 375F. for 20 minutes in the oven. Pre treat meat with Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper to taste, I like "Grillmasters". For Chicken, make sure the center is moist, but white. For Steaks, I like mine medium.

Not only does quality and quantity of seasoning matter, but so does timing. If you know you’ll be cooking some nice thick steaks the next day, season them heavily with kosher salt and let them sit in the fridge overnight until you’re ready to let them come to room temperature. Even an hour of being salted can make a big difference in flavor.

Contrary to what some people may think, salting your steaks will not make them less juicy as long as they’ve been salted long enough. By doing so, the salt will draw out juices from the meat and onto the surface. As these juices dissolve the salt, a brine will form on the surface of the meat which breaks down the muscle fibers and is eventually reabsorbed by the meat. The amount of moisture lost to evaporation is negligible. Furthermore, allowing the salt to penetrate the meat in this way will give it a great flavor and crust. The optimal time is greater than 45 minutes as anything less than that will not be enough time for the meat to reabsorb the moisture pulled out by the salt.

Trained chef here. Little trick I know that helps people who are just starting. If you touch your pinky finger to your thumb the muscle under your thumb is how cooked meat should feel when it's rare. Don't squeeze just touch. If you touch your ring finger to your thumb the muscle goes to medium rare. Middle finger is medium. Pointer finger is medium well. Well done is burnt.

I’ve eaten so much boneless skinless chicken breast it almost makes me sick to eat. The only way I can stomach it now is the poach it in lemon water with herbs then finish it on the grill or pan just go get it browned.

For steak I let it get to room temp and grill/pan sear on high heat. I use salt pepper and mrs dash garlic on it.

For steak, use a marinade. I found a killer London Broil recipe that tenderizes, moisturizes and gives a great flavour. For roast beef, use a slow cooker. Put some water and a gravy packet in with it. For hamburger, just mix salt and pepper with the ground beef and use medium ground. You want a little grease in it for flavour.

Steak simple guide, let it get to room temperature, add olive oil and salt to the steak, get the pan nice and hot, pop the steak in the pan, count 60 seconds, turn over, count 60 seconds, pop it on a warm plate, leave it to rest for a few minutes, add pepper, eat.

This has been my proven and consistent method of cooking the perfect porterhouse cut of steak (I think it's called rib-eye in America?)

I normally just by the packaged steak from the supermarket as it's convenient and I believe my method brings the best out of the meat.

Preparation:

First step once taking it home is to take it out of the packaging and let the steak "dry" in the fridge. I normally do one side per day, but if you have a wired rack you could do it in a day. This step is important as it takes out the moisture resulting in a better crust forming.

Second step is to let it get to room temperature before I cook it, also seasoning with salt and pepper.

I used to ALWAYS overcook chicken because I was told by my ex, "if it's still pink, it's not done". Well sure as shit, I'd cook the hell out of it until it was leathery and awful.

Come to find out, my definition of pink was even the slightest hue of pink which through my eyes, there will always be some pink in chicken no matter what. I started timing my chicken and guessing and it's gone much better since.

Like anything else, practice and experience really help. But having iron skillet really helps and made things easier for me. Also it depends on the size of your meat for the the time it takes to cook. I usually like to do skillet plus oven then let the meat sit for 5-10 mins. Then cut it and ready to serve. Finding recipes online is where I started it.

Get everything you need out ahead of time. Nothing is going to throw you off more than having to run in the middle of doing something with gross hands to go and find the smallest tiniest ingredient you haven't used in 6 months. Prep ahead and just go.

I learned to cook steaks, or tenderloins, anyway, really well. Been a while since I have been to a restaurant that does them better than I do. And I used to think nothing of eating a hundred dollar steak.

Really, the key was research and practice. I read a lot of stuff on the Internet. It's all totally contradictory but that doesn't matter. You just need a starting point and different things to try.

Then I started buying whole tenderloins, of lowish quality. A whole tenderloin can be anything from 1.5kg to almost 2.5kg, so it is a lot of steak. I quickly realised I shoukd get them to cut the pieces as similar thickness as possible, as thickness is the main determinant of cooking time.

So then I had 6-8 steaks that I needed to cook and eat in a week! And that gave me a lot of chance to test and fine tune. Because they were similar in size I quickly figured out how long one needed (I used the oven method, which you always do for tenderloins of any size). First one or two of any batch might not have been quite right but after that they were nailed. A fresh batch was slightly thicker or thinner and needed some adjustments. But after a while I figured out how to estimate the cooking time just by looking at it. I also learned to tell how done it was just by prodding it.

This process of cooking and eating hundreds of steaks over a few years also let me try other things.

Growing up, Meat prep was a big thing in our family. My grandpa taught me a lot about it. The cut, the prep, the fire... For me it was a ritual, a right of passage as it were.

But to answer the question, for a steak nothing beats the reverse sear method. (slow start in the oven and the give it a nice crust in the pan, edge to edge perfection)

I have a science background so I used to get very specific about things, I remember making a design of experiments sheet to find out the exact surface response area graph to plot the juiciness, tenderness and pinkness of a steak. (It worked like a charm)

But the most I worked with emotion, the better and easier it got. Now I just go with the feeling rather than the clock and it just changed everything for me.

experiment a little until you find what you like, and then stick with that. For example, when learning how to make chicken, there was a caddy full of herbs in the house I rent, so I googled what goes well with chicken, and started working with it. I found rosemary and thyme work well with it. Put the seasonings on before you cook it, and don't be afraid that you are putting on too much. Also, put a teaspoon or so of veggie oil over chicken breasts before you cook them, and the seasonings will stick to it better. as far as beef goes, all you really need is salt and pepper before cooking. But if you are feeling fancy, there are specialty seasonings you can pick up like montreal steak seasoning which are tasty. when I am cooking steaks I always use the broiler, which just turns the top element on all the way. I put the oven rack as close to the element as the tray will fit, and a throw in my seasoned steak for a while (time varies depending on how thick the steak is) flip it, and leave it in for the same amount of time again. But like everything else, it comes down to practice.

Stop overcooking stuff. I really had to train myself to do that with chicken and pork in particular. I always had it ingrained in me as a kid that you NEVER want to undercook pork or chicken and as a result I would always end up over cooking pretty much all my meats to make sure I wouldn't get sick. I ended up just training myself to stop cooking those foods about 10 minutes earlier than I normally would. When I open the grill/oven, take a look at the food, and go "Hmm, I think it could probably use another 10 minutes or so" I'll just pull it out now instead. From what I've found, at least for me, I will KNOW when the food isn't done, but telling when it is done can be a bit of a pain, so now I frame the question differently. Ask yourself "Is this still undercooked?" If the answer is no, then pull it. Waiting for the food to be 'done' will tend to make you overcook it. Instead just pull the food as soon as its NOT undercooked if that makes sense.

Also for steak, I always use some mesquite woodchips even on my propane grill, get the grill nice and hot (around 475-525), then place the steak on the hottest part of the grill for about 2-4 minutes on each side (depending on the cut/thickness of the steak). That will sear the steak on the outside and give it some nice grill lines and a good color, then you can move the steak to the top rack of the grill and turn down the heat a bit. I'll usually try and put tinfoil on the bottom level of the grill underneath the steaks at that point so that if any juice drips down by the flames it won't cause a flare-up and char the steaks.

By moving the steaks to the top rack after the initial searing you'll be able to finish off the steaks at a much slower pace, which will give you plenty of time to check the inside and determine when the steak is just right. Otherwise if you're cooking it all on the bottom rack and the grill is raging hot, you've only got a few minutes to check and pull the steak before if goes from rare to well done, and you also increase the chance of a flare-up that could char the outside of the steak.

EDIT: Also for steaks, like others have mentioned, keep them out and let them get room temperature for a while. Usually for steaks I will pound them very lightly with a mallet just to loosen up the tissue, then I'll rub some large grain kosher salt and cream of tartar on each side of the steak, then douse it lightly with warcester sauce and let it sit for about an hour before cooking.

1 rule: Let the meat rest before cutting into it.

Steak

Remove steaks from the fridge at least an hour before cooking. Brush both sides of the steak with canola oil or melted butter. Season generously with salt and freshly ground pepper. Sear the steaks in a jet-hot cast-iron skillet 30 s each side, then finish in a 500°F oven. The total cook time is about 5 minutes as long as your steaks aren't too thick. Confirm doneness with a digital instant thermometer stuck in from the side, not the top (130-135°F for medium rare). After the steak comes out of the oven, rest it in a colander inside another bowl, and cover the top with aluminum foil. While the steak is resting, deglaze the skillet with cognac to make a sauce. Stir in a couple of tbsp of butter, then add the drippings from the rested steak.

Two things to note here--

There will be smoke while searing and cooking the steak, and that's fine.

Do not poke holes in or cut the steak until after it's rested. Use tongs to flip it, not a grill fork. Do not cut the steak open to check the color. It lets all the juices out of the steak, and that's a bad thing.

Chicken

Just chop it up and pan fry it. Chicken is difficult to cook with direct heat because of its irregular shape. It's much easier to make boneless skinless chicken into a stir fry and add whatever other ingredients you like. Onions start in the pan with the chicken so they have time to caramelize. Mushrooms are added after the chicken is completely white and starts to brown on the outside. Bottled pan sauces (like General Tso's sauce) and fresh tomato are added after the chicken is done browning. Bell peppers, zucchini, canned diced tomato, and most other vegetables are added last. Serve with noodles or rice.

Bone-in chicken cuts can be oven roasted fairly easily. Put them in the oven at 350°F and don't overcook them. I like tossing drumsticks in buffalo sauce (butter, garlic, and hot sauce) after they're done cooking. Alternatively, you can put barbeque sauce on the chicken before you roast it (Ah So Chinese barbeque sauce is very tasty).

For chicken please brine or marinade it also best to grill and finish in an oven as the grill will add flavor but dry it out faster. Steak season evenly and yes a thermometer also just my humble opinion cast iron steak>grilled baste it in some butter garlic thyme. That is the real way in my opinion. But hey to each their own. Oh also let it rest please.

Just made steak tonight. The way i do it, let em defrost, about to room temp.

Heat up pan (turn stove to full), while its heating up put some salt on the tops of the steak, then crack some peper. Once the pan is hot chuck em on the salt side, and then salt/pepper the other side.

Let em cook for a bit until you feel its cooked enough (dont be afraid to lift it up and check, it should a bit dark and start browning its way up the sides) and flip em, turn the stove to half of what it was.

Wait till the blood rises back up (you'll know, it'll 'shine') and flip them to seal them up. Move the pan off the hotplate and let them rest for a while until the juices start coming out (or 3 or so minutes).

Then serve however you like

Everyone's got their own way, this is the way i like mine (medium-rare)

Beat the chicken so it's an even thickness. It's impossible to perfectly cook a chicken breast that's an inch thick in the middle and a quarter inch thick in the end. Remove from heat immediately when the interior temperature hits 165. Anything higher is dryer.

I'm the wife of a good cooker of meat, ex wife of a bad cooker of meat. It was legitimately a relationship issue (partly because he just wasn't interested in my opinion, among other issues). I've learned a few things from my current husband. First, boneless chicken thighs are your best friend. They stay juicy and are small enough that it's pretty easy to tell if they're done. Learn what is actually required food safety wise, and keep on mind that the meat will continue to cook after you remove it from the heat source. Use a thermometer at first, but work towards getting a feel for how done meat should feel. It's less springy than raw meat, but the feel of done (but not overdone) meat varies by type of meat. Use marinade - at least a couple hours, no more than a day or so. Don't underestimate the store bought packets, many are very good and will save a ton of time. Brining is excellent to impart flavor in larger cuts of meat if you have the time.

The best advice I ever got was for chicken. Even if you want plain grilled chicken, soak the breasts or tenderloins in a basic brine for at least an hour. Add salt to water until the taste bears semblance to ocean water. You will NEVER have a dry chicken piece again. Same goes goes for turkey. I shit you not, I've soak an entire 15 lb turkey in a saltwater brine. Came out beautiful

My burgers were always...okay. I saw an episode of Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon Ramsey gave the chef a recipe for a burger so I thought “that’s gotta be the best fookin burger you’ve ever tasted”. Turns out it’s like meatloaf in burger form.

It wasn’t until I started working at a local restaurant that does everything in house, from grinding the meat to making the buns, that I learned how to make a burger.

This is how they do it there:

6oz hunk of meat. Put a little canola/olive oil mix (90/10 bought like that) on the grill. Drop a small handful of very thinly sliced red onion. Hold your hunk of ground beef and salt and pepper that bad boy. Then put it on top of the red onion and flatten to desired thickness/size and a little more salt and pepper. Let cook for a few minutes then flip. When it’s your desired doneness put some cheese on it and put on a bun.

After I ate their burger for the first time I thought for sure they put different stuff on there or seasoned it somehow. Ever since I worked there I’ve been using salt and pepper and an iron skillet to make my burgers.

The lower the quality of the cut the more you should flavor it. High quality cuts should only have salt and pepper, maybe Montréal seasoning. I pan fry steaks to keep the flavor in and juicy using the stove and oven.

Chicken: with few exceptions brine before cooking. A simple brown sugar and salt water brine for 30 mins to an hour before cooking can do miracles when making juicy meat.

Honestly, OP a HUGE part of it comes down to your current skill set. I can tell you things that will make a bad cook better, but aren't necessarily the perfect way to cook. e.g. Using a meat thermometer to check temp. Reality is a bad cook will end up poking 10 holes in their steak and draining the flavor. I've seen world class chef's throw a steak in a deep fryer. Obviously, that's terrible advice if you don't know what you're doing. Hell, I don't know what they were doing, but it turned out amazing.

Leave in thermometers and instant read thermometers. For slow cooking like baking or grilling I use the leave in versions. Quick cooked food, smaller pieces, or frying I use the instant read thermometer.

Also dont cheap out with the $5 versions. You dont need the $200 wifi connected versions but something in the $20 to $50 range is good.

For steaks, reverse sear is absolutely the way to go. In the oven at 275 for 15-22 minutes, depending on the cut. Pull out and plop in some ripping hot cast iron for around a minute or less each side. Consistent and amazingly delicious.

Chicken I usually marinate for a couple hours, sear both sides for a couple minutes and pop in the oven at 350 for another 18 minutes or so.

Ive all but stopped making whole chicken breasts though, I meal prep about 3 pounds of pulled chicken at least once a month with rice, black beans and roasted peppers.

For the chicken, I sear it all in a Dutch oven, then simmer it in about a cup of chicken broth (I use that "better than bouillon jar stuff) with a can of chipotles in adobo (canned green chiles with jalapeños works well too), cayenne pepper, ancho chili powder, cumin, oregano, salt, pepper and a couple Bay leaves.

Then for the beans I cook about half an onion diced really small, add some garlic, add 2 cans black beans, then I pour off about half of the liquid from cooking the chicken, and simmer the beans in It. Makes awesome burritos.

Let a steak rest after it’s done cooking. If you eat it straight off the grill, it’ll be too hot to enjoy anyway. The best flavor comes when it’s just warm, and the juices have had a chance to drain onto the plate.

Salt and pepper always and in good quantity.
After you cook your meat let it rest for 10 minutes it will not cool down, and Wil get much better taste and a good temperature to eat it.
Besides how you like it, if it's on charcoal a gas griddle or anything else, just try a and you will find the perfect point for you

Edit: forgot about chicken, if you put the chicken pieces in brine for like 8 hours more or less depending how salty you want, your chicken will loose all the water and gain the brine inside making it super tasty. Also salt and pepper before cooking it always remember salt and pepper if people star using those more world would be much happier

Letting steaks sit out to come to room temp does nothing. The best steak I ever cooked was by slow cooking it and then cranking up the heat while the steak rests and cools. Once the heat is high (above 400F) seer it. This helps the fat on the steak to be tender instead of chewy. It also helps remove moisture so you get a good deer instead of a grey piece of meat.
Also, let the steaks sit uncovered in the fridge overnight before cooking. Put kosher salt and pepper on them. The salt will draw the moisture out, then soak back into the steak.

Don’t poke holes in your meat to get the marinade in the center. Injection is your best bet.

Chicken and all poultry should be brined prior to cooking, unless using a marinade. I prefer not to use oils in marinades because this creates a barrier around the meat and keeps the seasonings from getting into the meat. NEVER MARINADE A STEAK OR I WILL TRACK YOU DOWN AND THROW IT IN THE TRASH. Steak is great because it’s a good cut of meat and has all the flavor you need in the meat. Less is more. Salt, pepper, maybe an aromatic herb like rosemary if you’re feeling fancy. That’s it.

Garlic + chicken = good
Garlic + steak = bad

Use a good quality lump coal instead of briquettes. Also, get a charcoal chimney instead of using lighter fluid. Indirect heat for chicken, direct heat for steaks.

Rub the skin of your chicken with a neutral tasting oil like canola. This will help the skin crisp and brown better. Don’t use butter because it has water in it and this will cause splotching. Do this for steaks and burgers as well.

Best advice for chicken, stick to the darker cuts like thighs. Easier to cook well without drying it out like breast meat can sometimes. Also always buy skin on and bone in for roasting and don't be afraid to season. Bone in is much cheaper too.

For beef steak, let settle to room temperature, sear on as high heat as possible for a short time period as possible. Or I really prefer to BBQ a triangular cut like rump cap, so you just slice off the end as it's roasting at the desired level of rare to medium.

Or stick to cheaper cuts like chuck, sear again on high heat and slow cook 4-12 in liquid. Can't really mess up if you have a good liquid, spices, veggies etc. as long as you cook it for long enough but that only requires planning at the cost of no additional labour.

Been a chef for nearly 12 years now. Honestly it's all about seasoning and resting.

With steak or anything that's cooked at a high temp on a griddle or pan you almost want double the seasoning as most of it will burn off or get rubbed off. Also oil the meat and not the pan as the oil will burn.

All meat is better when it's rested. It allows the fibres to relax and release juices. Steak should be rested for a minimum of 5 minutes. Chicken on the bone should also be rested for at least 5 mins. Once rested pour the juices back over the meat or use in a sauce.

Cast iron pan. Start off nuclear hot. (A good pan will not ‘smoke’, time to re-season it if it does)

Sear seasoned steak around the edges first with a set of tongs, do flat faces next, sprinkle more dried seasoning on the top then throw that sucker into the oven (pan and all) for about 8-10 minutes for just under medium rare. Thermometer check, back in or serve as indicated.

USE A DRESSING BOARD. You basically butter and season a concave cutting board. After letting the steaks rest, you cut on the board and kinda toss everything around in the juices and butter and it's a 100% game changer. I can no longer order steak at a restaurant, it's that good

I slow roast chickens at about 175°c (350f) after about half an hour at 220°c, turning them several times on a rack to crisp the underside and keep the breast moist, probably a bit longer than other people do and I don't use a meat thermometer, which gives a chance for all the lovely brown meat to cook to perfection, for the internal fat to render, and be crispy all over.

I've always done better cooking on the grill than the stove so I'll tell you my methodology. As always, your mileage may vary. I thaw the meat then season it with lower sodium season salt (I use Lawry's) and garlic powder. I make sure it has about an hour to soak in. When I'm ready to cook, I preheat my grill until it's absolutely screaming hot. If you don't lose some hair on your knuckles, it isn't hot enough. Put the meat on the grill, close the lid and turn the flame down to medium-ish. I use a timer for 3 minutes, then flip, then 3 more minutes. That usually gets me a nice medium to medium rare for steak. I'll sometimes check with an instant read thermometer if it looks questionable. Visually looking at doneness is a learned skill over a lot of grilling. Chicken gets another flip and 3 minutes then a flip and bbq sauce (I use Stubb's), then the same doneness check. Seriously get an instant read thermometer and use it until you can tell.

edit: I should also add that I don't mess around with those comically thick 3" "steaks". Where I'm from, that's called a roast. A normal 1" steak cooks better for me. I've also been known to split really thick chicken breasts to make them cook more evenly and not be pink in the middle and black on the outside.

I've always done better cooking on the grill than the stove so I'll tell you my methodology. As always, your mileage may vary. I thaw the meat then season it with lower sodium season salt (I use Lawry's) and garlic powder. I make sure it has about an hour to soak in. When I'm ready to cook, I preheat my grill until it's absolutely screaming hot. Put the meat on the grill, close the lid and turn the flame down to medium-ish. I use a timer for 3 minutes, then flip, then 3 more minutes. That usually gets me a nice medium to medium rare for steak. Chicken gets another flip and 3 minutes then a flip and bbq sauce (I use Stubb's).

For meat you will get a lot of different answers. Some like to sear it at high heat and others like to cook it an sear it at the end (reverse sear). Someone told me to remember meat is a muscle. Cooking it at a lower temp for long then searing will get the meat more tender. Also, the cut of meat as well as quality is very important. On the grill, I like to cook the meat that is about 1-1/12” thick at 450 for 8 min a side then reverse sear up to 2 min a side at 600.

Chicken is pretty easy. To make it better cut an onion and put is at the bottom of the cooking dish. Place the chicken with a lemon and rosemary in the cavity on top of the onion. Cook at 325 for 90 minutes and check temp.

Steak is easy. Make sure it's a good cut, like USDA choice. I usually broil on high; ~1inch, brush with melted butter, 10 minutes in one side, flip, 8 minutes the other side, cover with foil, rest for 5 mins, salt/pepper.

Chicken depends on the cut but Szeged chicken seasoning is the bomb!!!

Are we talking on the grill or stove/ or oven? Either way though i would say you want really high heat for steak because you just want to sear it. Turn after about 5 minutes. With Chicken you want a much lower temp for a longer time because you want to have that cooked evenly through, not black on the outside and raw on the inside.

Preparation

Preheat oven to 200°F (95°C).

Generously season all sides of the steak with salt and pepper.

Transfer to a wire rack on top of a baking sheet, then bake for about 45 minutes to an hour until the internal temperature reads about 125°F (51° C) for medium-rare. Adjust the bake time based on if you like your steak more rare or more well-done (you monster).

Heat the canola oil in a pan over high heat until smoking. Do not use olive oil, as its smoke point is significantly lower than that of canola oil and will smoke before reaching the desired cooking temperature.

Sear the steak for 30 seconds on the first side, then flip.

Add the butter, garlic, rosemary, and thyme and swirl around the pan.

Transfer the garlic and herbs on top of the steak and baste the steak with the butter using a large spoon.

Baste for about 30 seconds, then flip and baste the other side for about 15 seconds.

Turn the steak on its side and cook to render off any excess fat.

Rest the steak on a cutting board or wire rack for about 10 minutes. Slicing the steak before the resting period has finished will result in a lot of the juices leaking out, which may not be desirable.

Slice the steak into ½ -inch (1 cm) strips, then fan out the slices and place on plate.

Throw it into the fucking garbage because meat is murder but more importantly it will kill you.

I live in a city so I grill occasionally but most times I use a pan so these are pan grilled advices.

Steak:

season it 40+ mins prior to cooking. If you choose to marinate it then 8+ hours at least but I do a good day or two if I marinate. If you cook it to medium or further because you don't like seeing a little pink in the middle. you have ruined it. sorry.... you just can't have a super tender juicy perfect steak that's cooked medium unless you're cooking filet mignon and even then it would've been better if you hadn't cooked to medium. If you think a medium steak is tender and juicy and perfect, you're living inside a bubble.

Sear it on the highest heat on both sides then flip back to the original side and cook it on a medium heat. in about 4-5 mins cut into it to check how well it's been cooked. I do medium rare so pink and small sliver of red in the dead center but you can cook to pink with no red and it'll still be fuckin great.

Chicken:

Season it however you want really. Let it sit a while. Maybe 40 mins or so. It's not the same as steak but I just by standard let seasoning sit for at least an hour personally. Marinating the chicken will be better but marinating takes longer and I would spend a day minimum personally. Chicken is very very simple. Cook it on medium low heat. Don't ever use high heat. Chicken becomes dry EXTREMELY easily. If it is cooked too fast it will always be dry. It takes longer but on medium low heat with patience and 15-20 mins on your hands you can pan grill a pretty juicy tender chicken breast. With drumsticks and wings it's even easier to make it juicy and tender.

a good meat thermometer for sure, and not the fork kind, those just cause the meat to lose juice.

Start with meat closer to room temp than fridge temp. It will allow the inside too cook at a closer rate as the outside the outside isn't burnt and the inside is raw.

take it off the BBQ/oven/smoker 5 degrees before it's at temp and tent with foil for 10-15 minutes before cutting. It will continue to cook and reabsorb the juices.

don't buy shitty meat. Check out the butcher box. We didn't believe that value of flavor until our first box came.

Find yourself a spice/seasoning store and talk to a sale person about flavor profiles and chemical uses. Don't rely on McCormick's Grill Mates.

Check out Steve Reikland on TV and his books. He is amazing. He has a BBQ Bible that use weekly. Also, test kitchen, Cook's illustrated, and Milk Street or anything Christopher Kimbell has been involved with is extremely helpful and accurate.

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I started on a cheap smoker 6 years ago not knowing much, and have become quite popular for brisket, steaks, chicken, salmon, beans, and potatoes.